Jay Nordlinger’s virtue signaling
Jay Nordlinger’s “Struggling” gives another glimpse of the cuckservative mindset at National Review (where Nordlinger is senior editor). A general theme is that the NR community is more civilized and more moral than those nasty Alt Right people. It begins with a complaint that Trump’s new campaign manager, Stephen Bannon, uses bad words in private to refer to establishment Republicans, quoting Betsy Woodroff of The Daily Beast.
Donald Trump’s new campaign boss — the guy white supremacists are so excited about — once described D.C.’s top Republicans as “cunts.” Stephen Bannon . . . used the phrase two years ago in emails with Breitbart reporter Matt Boyle. Bannon ran Breitbart at the time, and the two schemed about how to get activists to “turn on the hate” as part of a plan to “burn this bitch down.”
I suppose that what Bannon meant by using that word was approximately what we mean by calling Nordlinger and establishment Republicans cuckservatives — men who don’t have any balls, who have sacrificed their masculinity to the goal of joining liberals in the virtue signaling competition that is so typical (and unique) to Western cultures. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it. When it doesn’t come down to worrying about their jobs in a GOP re-fashioned by the Trump Revolution, the real horror that prevents them from endorsing the Alt Right is that they will be characterized as morally defective by the New York Times editorial board and other pillars of the establishment.
This becomes obvious in his quote from Roger Scruton:
I thought of what Roger Scruton said to Mona Charen and me, in a podcast last year: “I think that, in the end, there is something that unites all conservatives, which is that they are pursuing something they love. My view is that the Left is united by hatred, but we are united by love: love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on. And what makes us conservatives is the desire to protect those things, and we’re up against people who want to destroy them, and it’s very simple.”
Now as an admirer of Scruton, I would not quarrel with the idea that the left is motivated by hatred — witness the vicious attacks on Trump supporters and Alt Rightists. The mainstream view on the left is that anything is morally justified when dealing with such people. “No free speech for fascists.” Not to mention physical attacks.
But where Nordlinger goes wrong is to suppose that Alt Rightists and Trump supporters do not have a moral vision and a genuine love of “love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on.” We just think that our institutions, the rule of law — not to mention the country we grew up in and came to love — cannot possibly withstand the immigration onslaught of millions of people who, encouraged by the media and academic establishment to plug into the anti-White grievance industry as soon as they set foot in America, care nothing for any of this. Nor can traditional family life withstand the domination of the media by leftist elites hostile to the traditional people and culture of the US.
But writers like Nordlinger, claiming William Cuckley as the standard of conservative thought (“Will it be Bannon or Buckley?”), steadfastly hold on to their ideas that immigration is a conservative principle (as Bret Stephens recently claimed), that immigrants are “natural conservatives” (even though they vote overwhelmingly for big government, anti-White racial entitlements), etc.
Nordlinger errs in thinking that the desire to “burn the bitch down” could not be motivated by love of country, institutions, etc. When everything underlying these institutions is threatened by our hostile elites, the only choice is to bring it all down. Trump is a revolution, and I think a lot of his supporters see him as throwing a wrench into a corrupt system that is light years from serving their interests — that anything would be better than what we have. The NR-favored candidates would have been nothing more than midwives to the destruction of all these things, perhaps just a tad slower than Obama-Clinton, et al. We need people who are angry — very angry — at the system.
And regarding Bannon, the following is encouraging — and a bit worrying about Trump.
Last year, in a November interview with Bannon, Trump regretted the loss of a worker who took his skills back to his native India.
“We’ve got to be able to keep great people in the country,” Trump said. “We have to be careful of that, Steve. I think you agree with that, Steve?”
Bannon did not. “A country is more than an economy,” he retorted. “We are a civic society.” (“‘Racialists’ are cheered by Trump’s latest strategy“)
Although I think Trump should keep such ideas under wraps until after the election, the US is indeed more than an economy, and our civic society is based ultimately on the racial core of Europeans that created the institutions and culture of the country. An immigrant from India may be very competent but is unlikely to identify with the people and culture who created the US. We have to consciously and explicitly stand for the proposition that this is and should remain a European civilization. These institutions cannot survive Whites becoming a minority and indeed, another Supreme Court judge on the left would go far to destroying the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Second Amendments, and much else.
The theme that the US is more than an economy is a virtual anthem of the Alt Right among whom identity is front and center — something the cuckservatives at NR will never understand or sympathize with.
After all, if they did, they would be branded as moral reprobates by the usual suspects.
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