The
first stop on my journey the America First gathering in Washington was
the National Harbor, a
pod-people colony just outside the capital. I pulled into the designated garage
and found a spot on the designated floor. At the stated time the lights of a
car not far from where I parked started to flash. I walked over, got in and
found the directions to where I was to meet my interlocutor. The keys were in
it so, I drove it to the address listed on the envelope.
Driving around the National Harbor, I could
not help but think this place is the American equivalent of the house on the embankment.
It is a colony of about 4,000 people, all of whom are there because they work
in the imperial bureaucracy in some capacity. Some are “private sector” while
others are government employees. They are not high up in the system but some
could climb the party ranks. Others will spend forever as imperial
functionaries until the revolution comes for them…
The AFPAC event was held outside the capital at a secret
location in Virginia. I arrived as everyone else arrived and I could not help
but notice that the average age of the event was looking to be high 20’s. The
median age was not far from it. I was going to be the geezer in the room. This
is something that is unavoidable, at least until the state commits me to a rest
home. These rooms seem to get younger, but in reality I’m just getting older.
The rooms don’t change all that much.
What does change though is the energy in the room. I’ve been in
rooms full of young dissidents and it feels like a funeral. This room was
jumping. It was also the sort of high quality people dissident politics needs
to attract. These were young men who were comfortable in a jacket and tie.
Based on my conversations, I would assume the typical attendee was middle to
upper middle-class and a college grad. In other words, they had other options,
but chose dissident politics.
A sign that something has traction is when famous people show up
just to be in the audience for the event. Having a famous person speak is one
thing. Getting them to sit with the hoi polloi in the audience is another thing.
Gavin McInnes was there, socializing with everyone. Various internet
personalities were there like Baked Alaska, Roosh the Little Red Elephants guy
and the Ralph Retort guy. Like everyone else, they were there because they
wanted to be part of the scene…
One of the positive things about this scene is the young guys
really do seem to get that politics is not about being right, but about being
persuasive. What killed the alt-right, one thing among many, is they had the
political sophistication of teenagers. You still see it with the remnant of the
alt-right. They hate on a kid like Fuentes, because he does not go hard on
their issue. They can’t see past their own feelings and appreciate that Fuentes
and his following are doing useful work.
That’s something I picked up talking with attendees. My guess is
most are to the right of Fuentes and Malkin, but they appreciate that the two
of them are a useful face to the public they are trying to persuade. There was
no one in the room thinking they were living in Weimar Germany. Many, despite
their youth, knew they were picking up from the Buchanan movement which came
and went before most of them were born, much less politically aware. They know
their history.
That is, however, the one thing that kept coming to mind as I
chatted with the attendees and listened to the speeches. It felt like a room
during the Buchanan campaign or how it felt during the Reagan years. Those
rooms were bigger and had all the same energy, but the result was failure. The
reason was what Sam Francis noted forty years ago about what he then called the
New Right. As soon as you engage with the system, you agree to play by its
rules. The house never loses.
Maybe that is a favor the Left is doing for dissidents. More
than a few people said to me something along the lines that we cannot vote our
way out of this. I don’t think these guys see conventional politics as an end
in itself, but just one of the many tools to be used in the larger project of
building an alternative orthodoxy. They don’t have a lot of answers on that
front, but at least they get it. That puts them a big step ahead of the
Buchanan people and the paleocons a generation ago…
Michelle Malkin is a good example of why civic nationalism must
inevitably lead to someone like Ben Shapiro lecturing you about the creedal
nation. Her speech was pretty much what Ben Shapiro says, except she strongly
opposes immigration and what she calls globalism. For obvious reasons, Malkin
must argue on ideological grounds, rather than from nature. Her brand of
dissident politics must be open to everyone, who accepts the ideological points
of her program.
It’s one of those things that sounds good in theory, but in
reality it is impossible to police ideological borders. The Left has been
trying to solve that puzzle since the French Revolution and it always ends in
disaster. The right-wing effort at it led to Buckley conservatism and
eventually David French. For now, ideology and argument are the tools required
to win people to our side, but ultimately the goal must be boundaries that do
not require constant maintenance…
Listening to Fuentes speak, I was thinking about how this spasm
of white identity politics has mirrored previous iterations. The alt-right
split in two. One group is seeking to operate above ground and gain legitimacy.
The other group retreated into a self-imposed ghetto. The TRS crowd is really
just a younger version of the old Stormfront community that formed up after the
Buchanan movement. Go back further and it is a replay of the Bircher-Buckley
split.
Fundamentally, these splits are over presentation. The “optics”
side cannot fathom why the hardcore cannot understand the need to make a good
presentation. The hardcore cannot understand why the optics guys don’t see the
dangers of compromise. Both sides are right, but both sides have always failed.
The hardcore ends up in something similar to a cult and the optics guys get
gobbled up by the system. There really needs to be a different approach to this
in order to avoid a repeat of the past…
After
the event, all of us retired to the Trump International for drinks. It was
packed, so everyone ended up at another bar. Word must have got out that a
100-plus dissidents were loose in the city, as many of the CPAC people started
to turn up. Mike Cernovich arrived to little fanfare. My old friend Mindy Robinson was
there. She was disappointed that the bar did not have a pole for her to swing
on, so she picked a fight with another women and was escorted out by police…
Spend time in the Capital
and you quickly understand why these people are so divorced from our reality.
It is a company town. We are not ruled by a class of people so much as by a
village of aliens. Everything about their lives is in the Imperial Capital and
the surrounding suburbs. They work, socialize, mate and reproduce all in the
insulated world of Washington. Not only that, it is a great life. The nightlife
is fun. The work pays well and demands very little. It’s like a fantasy world.
That’s the trouble though. I was
telling some people about when I was walking around Saint Petersburg and
suddenly grasped why people rise up and smash their rulers in a bloody
revolution. It’s not because they are cruel or they have so much and the people
have so little. That is a part of it, for sure, but the real spark is the
indifference. The people in Washington, living off the imperial system, simply
don’t care about what goes on outside the imperial capital. We don’t matter…
On final note. Patrick Casey is proving to be a very effective
organizer. He’s not flashy and he has no illusions about what he is doing. He
put together a first class event that came off without a hitch. The jury is
still out on Fuentes, but he is young and he is smart to partner with Casey.
They make a very good team. I’ll also note that Scott Greer was a great
addition to the show. His speech was a great lead-in to Fuentes and Malkin.
He’s an example of the high quality people we need to attract.
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