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An obscure figure from the old Alt Right takes the Hanania Pill.
The main reason I am posting this is not that, but to highlight his insider's history of the 2015-2017 era Alt Right which makes up much of an accompanying article.
1: Hanania's apparent survival of cancellation for past extremism via telling his story and disavowing his most extreme past views may have been quietly influential. This is the 2nd guy I've seen do it without even being forced to by exposure.
2: This guy claims to have been a quietly very influential figure and tells a story where his actions had a very outsized effect on the world. Maybe truly, maybe not. But his general account of events besides his own part in them is an insider's history of that much-mythologized period of the Alt Right, which was very influential and did have have a very outsized effect on the world, and his account seems to be a reasonably well-calibrated explanation of how their influence rippled into events.
The Hanania pill seems to consist of arrogant shitstirrers realising that they loathe most white people just like they loathe everyone else.
God forbid.
"It turns out I was the rootless cosmopolitan all along. :'("
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He has no idea that those white Midwesterners have won. Why are their towns so homogeneous? Why are they all the same type of person, with the same type of culture? Why are they not Diverse?
He wants the hustle'n'bustle of the coastal cities, where he will triumph in competition as iron sharpens iron, but he also wants to be protected from competition for his labour by H1B immigrants. Well, are those Midwesterners worried about "sustained immigration of high IQ and ethnically nepotist immigrants from India into highly paid tech jobs, blocking the sons of the American middle class from the possibility of upward social advancement and leaving them stranded in five figure wagecuck hell"? I'm getting the impression that the answer there is "no".
This guy wants to be pampered, but also have the illusion that he's a rough-n-tough descendant of adventurers who dukes it out with equals and wins by virtue of his bigger brain. He has no idea where those "adventurer" ancestors come from, he doesn't want the actual adversity of fighting for a job against cheaper labour which is where the self-interest of the business owners leads them, but he still thinks that the five contradictory viewpoints he espouses can be reconciled, as long as he always comes out on top of the pile.
If a midwestern town is homogenous it's for the same reason that rural areas are homogenous anywhere in the western world: they are poor and isolated enough that migrants don't want to move there. The great cities that midwesterners built (St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago etc.) have been handed over to outsiders where they now have some of the highest murder rates in the developed world.
Yes, and in general the depiction of small town midwestern USA as some kind of paradise is ridiculous. Stripmallville with a dying main street, Applebees as the best restaurant, no organic spontaneous community because you have to drive everywhere (even to somewhere a half mile away because there’s either no sidewalk or you’re separated by an interstate that goes right through the middle of town), no beautiful architecture, and the same slowly declining social trends (birthrates, single motherhood, drug addiction) as the rest of the country, just 20 years behind is not some bucolic garden of eden.
Indeed, if one lived in the Midwest and actually wanted the kind of comfortable, pastoral, low risk existence @Walterodim described they’d be best off getting their proof of German ancestry in order, applying for a visa and moving to some little village in Bavaria or Baden Württemberg with zero immigrants; at least there the scenery is much better, the architecture is better, the schools are probably better, the buses are both more frequent and more timely and you’re actually in (or nearer to, certainly) the homeland of your ancestors.
To be clear, this is not my personal preference. I live in a small Midwestern city with around 250,000 people, it's 80% white but has a large university with the expected immigrant population associated with it. Having traveled in Europe, I vastly prefer living in the United States due to the much higher standard of living. Also, at the end of the day, I'm not actually a German no matter how high of a percentage my ancestry German is, and it's really obvious when I visit Germany. I'm an Amerikaner with Amerikaner preferences, which includes my distinctly non-white wife. The city I settled in offers a balance of comfortable, low-risk community with city amenities that I really do consider just about unbeatable anywhere in the world. I don't expect others to have the same preferences - that's fine!
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Your portrayal of most American small towns is at least 10 years out of date.
I’ve been to many wonderful small towns in the US, but they were all in New England or in the outer suburbs of wealthy cities and the residents all had some source of external wealth, either from commuting into highly-paid PMC jobs in the nearest major city or from tourism. And again, if it’s a low variance rural lifestyle in a pretty, walkable, homogenous locale, much of Western Europe easily vastly outdoes the US and the US’ advantages (like much higher salaries) are less necessary.
Idk, what actually rural small Midwestern towns very far from the nearest major city are you thinking of? Happy to take a look on Streetview.
For nice, liveable midwestern towns I would put Madison IN, Granville OH and Bardstown KY as examples. Not saying they beat western Europe for the small town lifestyle, but I think they'd be perfectly fine places to live. The problem isn't so much that they look like Mordor it's just that they have no real economy or job opportunities beyond providing services for retirees to spend their social security on, stuff like insurance agent, nurse at the local clinic, auto mechanic etc. I assume that's probably similar in Europe but idk.
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My deep experience is admittedly more in northern Appalachia than in the plains, but right off the bat:
-- Any market big enough to support an Applebee's has at least three (3) microbreweries/distilleries run by local boys. I grew up on road trips, and time was that you really did have the choice of stopping at Cracker Barrel or playing roadside diner roulette. In the age of Yelp and the Smartphone with Data Connection, you can find an interesting high-effort place to eat in some real tiny places. When I go on a trip to a tiny rust-belt town four hours from a major city and get local pickle-beer and pick from a well considered menu, it's such a sea-change from when I was a kid.
-- I drove through three towns, admittedly not that far from a major city, over the weekend where I saw ~1500sqft row homes available under $200k, reasonably walkable to a bar, a church, an elementary school, and a convenience store (in addition, of course, to many other homes). You will need a car to go to work, in all likelihood, or to most other places. You're never going to get the walkable variety you do in the big city, it's not a big city, you're going to get one bar and two churches.
-- RE: spontaneous community, I grew up in a small town exurb to a small city, geographically the very last place on the East Coast before the Midwest starts. I've since moved back after wandering around a bit. Most of my high achieving friends from the local high school couldn't wait to leave, and most of us did, some of us stayed, some of us came back. The proverb I've proved from reunions is this: only boring people are bored. The high schoolers who used to bitch about how much our town sucked and how there was nothing to do and how they couldn't wait to move to NYC/LA/Paris/Tokyo where Real Life was going on, well a lot of them moved to NYC/LA/Paris/Tokyo (or at least Chicago or Boston or SF) and now they bitch about how they can't afford to do anything and really the scene is dead for years and how the neighborhoods are either too gentrified or too dangerous or too touristy and there's nothing fun to do here anymore and the rent is too high and they work too much and they never get out and do anything. The people who used to drag me to sit on old couches and watch Noise Punk shows in the basement of a warehouse at Jeff the Pigeon's, who tried to put together abortive little local art shows and gave terrible slam poetry, who knew whenever a decent band was within an hour's drive and wanted to drive out to see it together, who threw barn parties and bonfires and smoked weed and read Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had tons of fun in our little town, some of them moved away, and some of them stayed, but they're all still doing cool things somewhere. Only boring people are bored, and only losers lack friends, wherever they are. There can be value in moving to shake up a hierarchy or to pursue a professional opportunity, but people are the same wherever you put them.
So when I read the OP article saying
It's really easy to diagnose the problem: the dude sounds like a fucking asshole. Just an absolute prick, dripping with disdain and a superiority complex. He didn't make a ton of friends in the midwest, but I'd bet he wouldn't make any friends anywhere you dropped him. Who would want to be his friend? He couldn't manage to get a date in the midwest, but I doubt he's much in the city either, outside of low-commitment trickery-based hookup culture.
A lot of people dream of living in a different context, but absent a causal mechanism for why they'd be better off I tend towards: it'll be the same for you.
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This thing sounds like something that could be written by a leftist, with just a few words changed. I mean, imagine something like this:
Actually, this sounds more believable than the original text. It's certainly more likely to be somewhere in ChatGPT's training corpus.
It's no wonder this man hates the Midwest -- he's basically a progressive activist, just with one or two ideas swapped around! The actual conservatism (and the pragmatism and realism he labels as "smallmindedness") he found there is as alien to him as it is to the woke moralist, and he rejects them for the same reason. They, in turn, reject his utopian vision -- because they're stupid and reactionary and the world is going to leave them behind. They're not on the right side of history. Don't they realize how much work there's been in
academiaright-wing internet forums about the systemic racism againstBlack peopleWhite people deeply ingrained in American society? Just do another search-and-replace of "smallminded" and put in "prejudiced."@FiveHourMarathon and I have gotten into arguments in the past about the nature of conservatism, but regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it. This is not the writing of a conservative, desiring to hold on to the lasting traditions that have been gifted to him by his upbringing. This is an ideologue, a radical, someone animated by the same spirit of the age that motivates the Communist revolutionary or the social justice activist. And he has the same smug self-assurance that, if empowered, would drown his neighbors in a lake and call it baptism.
Everything this guy writes is just a massive argument for Hlynka's position -- the strong form, not the way-too-far version he started saying later on -- that white identitarians are schismatic progressives, not really conservatives. I know he made some very strong and silly claims that extrapolated too far from the connection he saw. But guys, this right here is exhibit A.
He's a Cecil Rhodes Imperialist, and the problem with Cecil Rhodes Imperialism is that it's all about the Empire and nothing about the homeland. It very easily devolves into this guy's brand of "I don't care about the Whiteness as such anymore, I care about the money and success" version of Empire, jeering at attachment to a local plot of land. Chesterton mocked such sentiments a lot, as in pointing out how Empire Day was the brainchild of Canadians, and it has since been watered down to Commonwealth Day as the Empire has fallen apart.
(Warning for what may be perceived as anti-Semitism)
From "Songs of Education":
II. GEOGRAPHY
Form 17955301, Sub-Section Z
The earth is a place on which England is found,
And you find it however you twirl the globe round;
For the spots are all red and the rest is all grey,
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Gibraltar's a rock that you see very plain,
And attached to its base is the district of Spain.
And the island of Malta is marked further on,
Where some natives were known as the Knights of St. John.
Then Cyprus, and east to the Suez Canal,
That was conquered by Dizzy and Rothschild his pal
With the Sword of the Lord in the old English way:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Our principal imports come far as Cape Horn;
For necessities, cocoa; for luxuries, corn;
Thus Brahmins are born for the rice-field, and thus,
The Gods made the Greeks to grow currants for us;
Of earth's other tributes are plenty to choose,
Tobacco and petrol and Jazzing and Jews:
The Jazzing will pass but the Jews they will stay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Our principle exports, all labelled and packed,
At the ends of the earth are delivered intact:
Our soap or our salmon can travel in tins
Between the two poles and as like as two pins;
So that Lancashire merchants whenever they like
Can water the beer of a man in Klondike
Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
The day of St. George is a musty affair
Which Russians and Greeks are permitted to share;
The day of Trafalgar is Spanish in name
And the Spaniards refuse to pronounce it the same;
But the day of the Empire from Canada came
With Morden and Borden and Beaverbrook's fame
And saintly seraphical souls such as they:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Chesterton was bitter because he saw that a certain traditional Englishness was subsumed by Empire. But the joke was always on him; most of that ‘traditional Englishness’ was itself less than a century old and the product of the first age of mass media in the early 19th century, before which much of rural Britain practiced an ancient, barely-ritualized, quasi-pagan kind of Christianity about as far as its possible to get from the orthodox Roman Catholicism Chesterton ultimately adopted. The Canadians who invented Empire Day were, in large part, ethnic Britons. It was conceived by one Thomas Robinson, likely of British extraction, in Winnipeg. The Lancashire merchants were ethnic English. Chesterton’s distaste for Jews like Disraeli and the Rothschilds obscured how profitable the Suez Canal was for Britain; it was India alone that was the whetstone around the empire’s neck, and if India had been jettisoned after the mutiny the entire enterprise would have been largely self-sustaining moving forward.
A century on, we can see that his distaste for empire was flawed. In truth, Britain is no worse off than those other Northern European countries that never pursued far flung imperialism, like Sweden. England’s cultural and civilizational decline is therefore likely unrelated to empire.
Cecil Rhodes was prescient. The only hope for Britain’s economy in the long is ultimately full economic union with the United States, and this has been clear since the 1890s. Of course, the less Anglo America gets, the harder it will be to convince them to let the British in.
I assume you're referring to the mutiny of 1857-58. Why exactly would jettisoning India have been a good idea in your view? I'd guess that anything that can reasonably be called a problem stemming from holding onto India could have been averted simply by turning it into a dominion, as the independence movement leaders wanted.
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A reactionary is just a conservative after the society they want to preserve has been destroyed.
A (constitutional) monarchist in Britain may be a conservative. A monarchist in France is a reactionary.
There are (a few)monarchists in France, but my understanding is that they’re basically all neoabsolutist fringe groups- which would also be quite reactionary in Britain or Spain or other countries where monarchism is a normal part of the center right.
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I don't think that "there's two camps: people who want to change the world, and people who want to hold onto tradition" is a good criteria for classifying political ideologies, because that would cause our judgements about which ideologies are really "the same" to become too relativized to the contingent circumstances that an individual person happens to find themselves in.
Suppose that Hlynka, a classic American liberal, finds himself transported to a Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist regime that has existed for around say, 100 years. I stipulate the timeline only so that we can see that this regime has existed long enough that its principles have become ossified as "traditional".
The question is: in this situation, is Hlynka a Red (wants to preserve tradition) or a Blue (wants to change the world)?
If Hlynka would change his ideological commitments and become a communist because "Reds uphold the social order, that's what Reds do" then I think that's simply a contingent personality trait of Hlynka's; it's not an inherent property of any particular ideology. If you just change your mind based on what everyone around you thinks, then that doesn't reveal any deep ideological commitments on your part. That's just a non-ideology.
If you try to bite the bullet and say "yes, Hlynka wants to change his society now, so he's now a Blue", then that seems to lead to a lot of problems. Is Hlynka now "the same" as the progressives and white identitarians that he spent so much time lambasting? We can also imagine that Hlynka is magically transported back and forth on a weekly basis between actual 2024 America and our hypothetical Communistan - is he "the same" as a progressive when he's in Communistan, and "not the same" as a progressive when he's in America? It's an absurd conclusion.
You could also try something like "yes, Hlynka now disagrees with the prevailing ideology of his society, but he won't actually try that hard to change it, because he knows how to make peace with the social order, and therefore he's still a Red". But again, this seems to me to be a personality trait, rather than an actual ideological principle. If you have two classical liberals, and one is really proactive about trying to take society in a more classically liberal direction and the other takes a more guarded "wait and see, everything in its time" approach, do they really have "different" ideologies now? I think we should just do the obvious thing and classify ideologies based on their stated principles, rather than the degree of ferocity with which their adherents are willing to fight for them.
TL;DR your ability to support "tradition" depends on the degree to which that tradition supports you. You could just be the kind of person who's happy anywhere. But that says more about you than it does about systems of governance.
I think this ignores the big gap between utopia and tradition. If you can point to a time when things were good, and say that you want to recreate those conditions as closely as you can, that might require considerable social change but I would still count it as 'traditional'. You can use 'reactionary' if you prefer.
Alternatively, if you have a vision for humanity that has never yet been properly realised, I think of that as being 'progressive' or 'utopian'. Utopia, of course, famously means 'nowhere'.
If you look at it like this, you have two axes: complacency vs revolutionary; and traditional vs utopian.
So I would be a revolutionary traditionalist; @2rafa's political friends would be complacent traditionalists, and Walt is a revolutionary utopian.
Conservative is non fiction, Reactionary is historical fantasy, Progressive is Science Fiction. At some level of remove, we don't really know what went on historically.
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Now add the traditional left/right division as a Z-axis and you've got a cube. We can call it the Corvos Cube and develop an insular and baffling lingo surrounding it.
Entirely too legible. I'd rather say that someone is "in the upper lefthand back corner of the purple sector of the Corvos Cube."
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That could certainly be an interesting thing to know about a political ideology - whether there are any actually existing historical examples of it being implemented. I'm not discounting that. But I don't think that property is relevant to establishing the identity of two ideologies (or their identity modulo one or two specific principles - the core claim I'm concerned with is "progressivism and white nationalism are just the same thing with the races switched").
One person's utopia could be fully automated luxury gay space communism with full dive VR available to everyone. Another person's utopia could be enslaving all of humanity in the service of building statues of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and outlawing anything that isn't directly relevant to achieving that goal. The fact that neither of their utopias have actually existed before is irrelevant in this case. There's no meaningful sense in which they have the same ideology. They're different.
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Right. I've got into arguments with people that I considered to be too conservative, on the basis that the world is changing without their permission and if they actually liked World State A then they may need to do something new in order to prevent us from moving further and further away from it. But this guy has exactly the same "the new world requires new people" energy as any Stalinist.
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