Two Rights Don’t Make A Wrong

     Suddenly the airwaves are aflame with controversy – mostly hand-wringing, really – about the “Alt-Right.” As matters worsen here in the Land of the Formerly Free, we can expect to hear more of this, for several reasons:

• The Left needs a chimera with which to frighten the uninformed;
• The “orthodox” Right doesn’t want to be “misunderstood,” especially by the media;
• Commentators need something to write about, and like “The sky is falling” for the subliminal theme.

     The ironies are beyond counting.

     The Alt-Right emerged out of outrage at the spinelessness of the “orthodox” Right, particularly the Ortho-Right's terror of having anything negative said about it in the Main Stream Media. If you, Gentle Reader, an American of generally pro-American and pro-freedom bent but perhaps confused about this separation, envision the Ortho-Right as John McCain and the Alt-Right as Milo Yiannopoulos, you'll have a pretty good picture of the reason for their extended-family squabble.

     Granted that many American conservatives wouldn’t be comfortable with having a British homosexual for their standard bearer, but that merely points up the most significant deficit accruing to the Alt-Right at this time: its lack of an attractive figurehead. We have yet to produce an attractive, dynamic, white, Christian heterosexual ballsy enough to stand front and center for propositions such as:

1. The races differ in important ways.
2. The sexes differ in important ways.
3. Homosexuality is an emotional disorder.
4. Christianity is benevolent; Islam is malevolent.
5. Equality, except for equality before the law, is a myth.
6. American culture is infinitely superior to all other cultures.
7. America’s prosperity and stature are principally the achievements of whites.
8. Most hostility to America – including from Americans – is powered by envy.
9. Americans owe nothing to non-Americans, except to allow them to go to hell in their own fashion.
10. It is normal, natural, and laudable to love one’s country, to want it to be strong and secure, and to be angry at seeing it derided, humiliated, or invaded.

     Still, there’s time.

     (Yes, I’ve said all those things before, emphatically and stridently. But I’m no leader; I’m an old crank desperately straining to prop up a house that’s determined to collapse upon my head.)

     Unfortunately, given the burgeoning strength of the movement and the convictions enumerated above, at some point a politician (Working maxim: “Show me the way the people are going and I will lead them”) will decide there’s enough potential money, votes, or publicity in the Alt-Right to fly frantically to the point of the V-formation and nominate himself as its leader. Yes, it will create opportunities for the Ortho-Right to co-opt the Alt-Right and “get it back onto the reservation.” Yes, it will be a time of danger for persons sincere in their convictions. But it’s in the nature of the overarching political dynamic:

Power is most likely to land in the hands of those who worship it

     ...that it will happen.

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     The current principal importance of the Alt-Right, whether as a scare-label or an emergent community of convictions, is as a message to the Ortho-Right:

“You’ve screwed the pooch.”

     Until recently, no one in the Ortho-Right with any public following was willing to entertain, much less express, that simple truth. Yet it is irrefutable. The Left has dragged the Ortho-Right in its wake, using the power of the media and “political correctness” to keep the Ortho-Right a couple of steps to the right of the Left’s position. (Cf. “moving the Overton Window.”) The Ortho-Right, concerned above all else with remaining within the zone of “acceptable discourse,” has followed like an imprinted duckling. It’s become essentially useless to the cause of freedom, American national sovereignty, and Constitutionally limited government.

     What more is needed to gestate an energized dissident splinter like the Alt-Right? Especially when millions of Americans were already imploring “their representatives” to act in accordance with the convictions they professed to get elected – something those representatives have become unwilling to do?

     What we’ve been hearing, though usually in softer tones and words, from the luminaries of the Ortho-Right is that the Alt-Right is wrong. That’s being proclaimed as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, when in point of fact there is not one shred of objective evidence that any of the beliefs enumerated earlier is false, or even questionable. What those luminaries really mean to say is that the Alt-Right is dangerous, and indeed it is – to them. It threatens their prestige, their altitude, their carefully nurtured audience.

     There is no real contest of ideas between the two Rights. The Alt-Right proclaims certain convictions, for which there is profuse objective evidence. The Ortho-Right merely deplores those proclamations, calling them wrong when they’re really only in violation of the artificial norms we call “political correctness.” In a sense, both communities are correct. It’s just that the time for excessive deference to people’s sensibilities – especially the pretend sensibilities of the Left, which is ever on the alert for opportunities to proclaim itself offended – is far behind us; we have a country and a civilization to defend.

     Consider the likely reaction of the Ortho-Right to this nonsense. Consider what the Alt-Right would say in contrast. Then imagine the shock and horror among the Ortho-Right. Add this recent development, rinse, and repeat. Such contrasts produce a pretty accurate encapsulation of the Right-on-Right face-off.

     I expect to write more about this. Stay tuned.