From a Chat to Metapolitics: A Journey in Thought, Part Two

Part 1

It seems to me that a cultural message of the following sort (the reader is invited to read it over and improve on it) needs to be communicated to white people, particularly the young:

You are white and that matters incredibly. You can be very, very proud of who you are. You owe it to yourself to learn about the best your race has thought and achieved over the span of its history so that you will know why.  Being a white person carries with it responsibilities: You need to develop your mind and body and character and personal effectiveness so that you can live honorably and decently and productively as a white man or woman by the highest standards of your race.  And you should feel an obligation to protect and enhance the places your forebears left to your care, and to look out for the wellbeing of your racial kinsmen.

The question, of course, is how to impart this message (or one that’s better).  The first thing that comes to mind is to do what the Cultural Marxists and their liberal allies have done so effectively in recent decades through the schools and the mass media, except do it in reverse:  that is, instead of tearing down whites and their ways and their heritage, build them up.

The problem with that approach, however, is that anybody disposed to go in that direction would not have ready access to the schools and to the mainstream media.  Entities that train and license teachers and the schools that hire them have zero tolerance for white consciousness and commitment, and white activists don’t control movie studios, television networks, newspapers, and record labels.  Also, going public with anything favorable about white people is dangerous: it’s a way to get smeared, harassed, snubbed, and marginalized, and to lose your job or not get the one you applied for, as well as to get rejected in school applications.  The evidence demonstrates that those who have advocated for whites under their own names—no exceptions I can think of—have paid heavy dues for it.

Which is not to say that the cause is hopeless.  It’s a benevolent universe.  Almost always, where there is a will — a clear intention —indeed there is a way.  So write your book or make your movie or forge a career in education or start your organization or run for political office, whatever it is.  But keep in mind that you are going to rub the people currently in power the wrong way and they are going to do their best to get you for it, so you need to be savvy about how you go at it or you’ll be beaten to a pulp.

Even if it turns out that your efforts don’t meet with success, that doesn’t mean the work wasn’t worth it.  I think of Albert Camus’ book, The Myth of Sisyphus.  Your path in life and mine might be Sisyphus’— spending our time on earth pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down on us.  But contrary to what one might suppose — and I can give personal testimony to this — this futile existence can be personally gratifying.  Living with integrity, in alignment with one’s highest values and purposes, successful outcomes or not, results in an overall, pervasive, sense of satisfaction with oneself and one’s life.  As Camus put it in his book, “The struggle itself is enough to fill man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”  Plus, even if you don’t get your boulder all the way up the mountain, boulder-pushing strengthens your muscles and makes you more powerful in the other areas of your life.  More, your diligence pushing a boulder might inspire others who are better at pushing boulders than you are to push ones that do get to the top of the mountain.

A big reason for hope in this day and age are the possibilities provided by the Internet and social media for getting messages across.  I personally am a creature of the Internet in my race-oriented writing—books, articles, my personal web site.  I would be publically silent on the topic of race if it weren’t for the Internet.  You wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t for the Internet.

A prime example of the effective use of electronic communication currently is the Alt-Right (Alternative Right), which is largely an online phenomenon—web sites, Twitter, podcasts, boards such as 4chan, memes, and so on.¹  In recent weeks the Alt-Right has come to the attention of the general public because of its support of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy.

Alt-Right writers draw a distinction I find useful between the political and metapolitical.  Metapolitical sounds to me to be akin to cultural in the term cultural hegemony (see Part 1).

Greg Johnson on his Alt-Right site Counter-Currents:

I am of the opinion that the most important avenues of attack for us are media and culture, not the political process or forming a party. . . . The strategy I prefer is metapolitical.  Our ideas are the truth and we must evangelize our truth to our people through social, cultural, and literary means.

Lawrence Murray on his site, Atlantic Centurian:

Metapolitics deals with the underlying causes and conditions of political change.  Metapolitics operates on two levels: intellectual and organizational. Metapolitical ideas include moral systems, religions, collective identities (tribal, national, racial), and assumptions about what is politically possible. Metapolitical organizations propagate metapolitical ideas, bridging the gap between theory and practice.

The political and metapolitical are interactive phenomena.  Political realities affect metapolitics; and the reverse is also true: metapolitics affects politics.  Having both constructs to work with (I’ll use cultural and educational as synonyms for metapolitical) is helpful in the context of this writing.  They provide lenses for understanding and assessing past and present political and metapolitical circumstances and their interplay, and for charting ways forward.  What’s gone on?  How’s it going now?  What should happen next?

Keeping both the political and the metapolitical realms in mind, here are some questions/issues that come to mind:

• How is the Alt-Right doing in the political realm? In particular, what are the political advantages and disadvantages, and likely political consequences, of the support for Trump? Will it hurt Trump? Will it help the Alt Right?
• How is the Alt-Right doing in the metapolitical realm? Back to Trump, how has he affected things culturally? Is Trump a good teacher of the Alt-Right, or white racial, metapolitical “curriculum”? How about The Right Stuff? American Renaisssance?  The Daily Stormer?  RADIX?  The Occidental Observer?  VDare? Alternative Right? The National Policy Institute?
• How is the Alt-Right and white activism doing with woman both politically and culturally? These efforts have been male-dominated. I get the sense that, in the main, the Alt-Right and white activism tend to be turn-offs to women.  To the extent that that is true, why, and what can be done about it?
• How are the Alt-Right and race realism doing with white university students and educated white people generally? In an article for this magazine, which was also published in its companion journal The Occidental Quarterly, I described a fictional “John Jones,” a composite of actual students I had worked with in the university.

John Jones has been in the hands of the enemies of white people all of his life, many of which, interestingly enough, have been white gentiles like John.  If there has ever been anything or anybody bad in the history of life on planet Earth, according to the people who have had his ear and graded his papers—the mass media, politicians, textbooks and teachers–a white like him did it.  Slaveowners, Nazis, brutish rural hicks and rednecks?—his people.  Who slaughtered the Indians?—there you go.  The exploiters of colonial peoples?  That’s right.  Thomas Jefferson?  He had a thing going with his slave.  Who kept Jackie Robinson out of baseball?  Three guesses.  The dreaded sexist, autocratic, privileged, oppressive white male?  All John has to do is look in a mirror.  Racists and haters?—the referent isn’t Jewish and black racism and hate.  Homophobes?  Who killed Mathew Shepard?  John’s kind did, that’s who.  The religious right?  Scary wackos.  John’s Catholic?  Pedophile priests, come on.

For all practical purposes John’s heart and mind have been had when it comes to race.  The mind shaping has worked.  John associates his whiteness with guilt and shame.  His racial identity is nothing to bring front and center and be proud of; rather, it is something to atone for.  And why should John see things any other way?  He couldn’t name a white advocate or a white organization if his life depended on it.  John Jones knows infinitely more about LeBron James and the NBA than he does about race realism.  Whites have no interests, no need for solidarity, no need for leadership or organization or collective action, no need for self-determination.  Every other group on the face of the earth, yes; whites, no.  To go in that direction is to be a racist bad guy and John Jones needs to be a good guy, in his own eyes and in the eyes of others.  In John’s mind, for whites to love their race and to work for its betterment they must feel superior to other races and hostility toward them and want to lord it over them.

John’s graduating from the university in June and hopes to get a good job.  Depending on how the job interviews go, he might wait tables this summer in Colorado.  Up the line, he’d like to have a family and live a respectable and happy and peaceful life.

Or let’s say John’s older.  There’s the job working for Aetna and the wife and two kids and a mortgage and visiting his aging parents on Sundays after the church services.  The grass needs cutting and his son is on a Little League team he’s coaching and his daughter is in a ballet recital coming up and he’s concerned about her getting bullied in school and through the Internet.  His wife is staying late at work a lot and he’s starting to get suspicious.  And he’s wondering if he has diabetes; anyway, he’s tired all the time.  It’s Tuesday evening at 7:30 and he has just finished putting away the dishes after the dinner he cooked (his wife had to work late) and his kids are in their rooms doing homework or something.

How are we doing with John Jones?  What are we going to do with John Jones?

It’s important to engage in both the political and metapolitical (cultural, educational) realms vigorously and concurrently, all the while keeping an eye on how activities in each realm have an impact on the other.  My basic posture with reference to just about anything — a work project, a family, artistic creations, a sports team, a social/political movement — is that people involved in these undertakings should do what they most believe in doing and can do well.  So whatever people are doing now, say in the Alt-Right movement with their web sites, if upon reflection it feels right to them, keep it going.

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that no matter what anybody does, it isn’t everything; other things need doing as well.  For example, currently there is a strong presence in the Alt-Right movement of a hard-edged, mocking, sarcastic persona and approach.  That’s effective — with some people.  A soft-edged, respectful, and sincere manner and way of doing things is effective too — with some people.  Another example: a good number of excellent intellectual, scholarly, “big picture” analyses and proposals are being produced—how everything works and basically what ought to happen.  That’s very much needed; do that if it’s what you do.  But needed too are “small picture” investigations that produce concrete, specific, doable activities and projects that can be undertaken in both the public and private dimensions of our lives.

The challenge for everyone who sides with the Alt-Right movement, or the white racial movement, whatever the preferred perspective, is to identify what he or she can best do to help move things along in a positive direction.  It doesn’t have to be anything big; little contributions add up.  And whatever it is, the individual doesn’t have to go public with it.  It may well make sense to lay low, stay underground, use a pseudonym.  Back to Camus, he worked anonymously in the French resistance during World War II.

But whatever you or I decide is best to do, we need to get to it before it is too late, both in the world and in our mortal existence.

Robert S. Griffin is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont.

Endnotes

1. Some Alt-Right web sites: Atlantic Centurian,  Counter-Currents, The Occidental Observer, The Right Stuff, VDare,  American Renaissance, RADIX, Alternative Right, Vanguard News Network, and The Daily Stormer.