The Other Trump Effect

Guest Post by The Zman

One of the things that is true of the dissident right is that it was helped greatly by the collapse of libertarianism. Starting in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s, right-libertarianism was a safe haven for temperamental conservatives to exist on the right, but also reject large parts of what was calling itself conservatism. The two most notable issues were the war on drugs and foreign policy. Most people were attracted to libertarianism because it was serious about small government and restrained foreign policy.

After the fiasco of the Bush years and the metamorphosis of the Left into a strange morality cult, libertarianism seemed ready to have its moment. The Ron Paul campaign of 2008 was probably the peak. While no one thought Paul could win, it certainly looked like he could break through and be a serious candidate. Then the New Hampshire primary happened, where he was able to get just eight percent of the vote. It was thought to be the ideal place for a guy running on libertarian ideas, but he bombed.

Talk to people in the alt-right and what you typically learn is they moved into dissident politics after the disappointment of the Ron Paul campaign. What they slowly figured out is that right-libertarianism was just a proxy for white identity politics. The sort of country imagined by Ron Paul could be nothing but a white country. Not only did it have no appeal to blacks, it could never be multi-racial. Put another way, if you want libertarian politics, you need libertarian people. Politics is down stream from culture and biology.

Left-libertarianism is just a beard for Progressivism, much in the same was conservatism is just window dressing for the prevailing orthodoxy. That’s something else you hear from alt-right people. Many passed through left-libertarianism, realized it was just low-tax liberalism, moved into right-libertarianism and finally race realism. This is a common story, even among Gen-X people who maybe started out as Buchanan supporters. They found the Ron Paul crowd the next best thing and moved into it in the 1990’s.

Something similar may be happening with Donald Trump. We’re seeing some new voices in the dissident right, guys like Josh Neal and Jefferson Lee, who have recently made the trip from the nether world of libertarian Trump supporter. There are a lot of people in the libertarian-conservative camp, who voted for Trump as the least worst option. These are the Flight 93 voters, who never really liked Trump, but saw him as an agent of change. He would break the old model of politics and usher in an era of reform.

A strong whiff of this is turning up in comment sections and social media, where people sympathetic to Trump are increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress. The overtly racial response to Trump from the orthodoxy has probably red-pilled more people than Jared Taylor has done in 30 years. The combined effect of Trump’s failures and the intensely racial response from his opponents, is having a similar impact on whites as the failure of Ron Paul libertarianism a decade ago. Disappointment is leading to discovery.

Inevitably, the Left had to make race and ethnicity central to their presentation, because it is explicitly a coalition of identity groups now. There is the Judeo-Puritan elite, ruling a collection of tribes based in ethnicity, race and selected perversions. There’s simply no way for the people at the top to rally their tribes without being explicitly racial. Even their anti-male rhetoric is obviously anti-white male rhetoric, which has always been an obvious war on white people. The elephant in the room is now visible to everyone.

The new blasphemy laws aimed at whites talking race is just a blunt force implementation of the old prohibitions against frank debates about race, but done so in a way to rally the tribes. On the one hand, the hope is they can stop the exodus of whites from both the Left and conventional conservatism, by anathematizing the subject. On the other hand, it is a useful way to rally the troops. The result, however, is that our politics are saturated in race and identity. Inevitably, whites are becoming race conscious.

That’s the other Trump effect. Most likely a Clinton or Bush presidency would have been another four years of more subtle race mongering. It’s hard to know, of course, but there certainly would not have been the panicked response from the orthodoxy if anyone else had won in 2016. It was the shock of Trump not only rumbling through the first line of defense and smashing the GOP, but then driving the populist tank into the middle of the Progressive camp. The response has revealed a lot that had been concealed.

What’s happening now is that the amorphous blob of whites variously called CivNats, Conservatarians, right-libertarians and BoomerCons, is waking up to the a hard reality that defines dissident politics. That is, the problem is not the people running the system, it is the system itself that is the problem. No open system can govern a multi-racial, multicultural empire. Liberal democracy is antithetical to multiculturalism. Voting will not change that reality. Something else must be done.

Just as many libertarians a decade ago realized that that you can only have libertarianism in a white society, many Trump people are learning something similar. The disillusionment with what is happening is leading many Trump supporters to doubt the institutions, rather than the people in them. You can have liberal democracy, orderly elections and the rule of law in an overwhelmingly white society. The lawless response to Trump and his policies is driving Flight 93 voters  into the camp of the dissident right.