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This also brings to mind perhaps the most important failure of the dissident right: the inability to handle political economy in with any eye at all to the traditions of their own nation. We'll call it the "capitalism question."
(1/11) https://twitter.com/zerowing0/status/1288580798665424897
(1/11) https://twitter.com/zerowing0/status/1288580798665424897
I'll credit people on the dissident right for pointing out in the mid 2010's that buccaneering, swindling, financialized capital markets were hilariously unconservative and that conservatives were fools and knaves for supporting them.
(2/11)
(2/11)
And to give credit where credit is due, this insight is no mean feat. It's easy enough to see now when we're in the throes of the Woke Capital Revolution, but back in the days of the Obama administration and the TEA Party, these things were much less clear.
(3/11)
(3/11)
However, as the dissident right coalesced, it started to turn not only toward fascist and communist criticisms of capitalism run amok, but toward fascist and communist solutions to American problems of political economy. This, too, was profoundly unconservative.
(4/11)
(4/11)
When you're trying to convince tradition-minded middle- and upper-middle-class American whites that you have the answers, you can't sell them communism or fascism. These are gloomy, stormy, troubled, FOREIGN creeds with no pedigree on these shores.
(5/11)
(5/11)
Americans rightly see ourselves as a nation of self-starters and pioneers; as inventors; as those who dare; as men who see as our birthright an ancient system of rights, including free enterprise. The way to appeal to these sentiments is not to crush them and debunk them.
(6/11)
(6/11)
It's to convince Americans that these historic liberties have already been crushed and are in need of rescue if they are ti be retained; that we've been sold a bill of goods about unrestrained market capitalism; that this is not our history, not what made us great.
(7/11)
(7/11)
We needed a tutelage on the fundamental Americanness of economically nationalist capitalism, one it should have been easy for the dissident right to make, since it is undeniably true. However, for the most, part they were uninterested in making it.
(8/11)
(8/11)
There are various reasons for this failure, but at the center of it lies the notion that the way to convince tradition-minded nationalist American whites is to tell them that they were the bad guys in WWII and that everything they thought they knew of history was a lie.
(9/11)
(9/11)
And concomitantly to tell them that these dreary, incomprehensibly alien economic ideas were to replace the creed of their fathers. It could never work. Indeed, the more it was demonstrated to not work, the more the dissident right doubled and tripled down on it.
(10/11)
(10/11)
It turns out that the John Birch Society was right after all, and we never needed to read a bunch of long-winded, reductive, and dismal Continental philosophers, after all. You fellows should have stuck with Trump and Americanism; we'd all be better off.
(11/11)
(11/11)
