As though to ensure that this year’s presidential campaign is forever remembered as the most bizarre American political spectacle of the last hundred years, many high-ranking Republicans have recently indicated that they will not be supporting their party’s candidate and instead will be voting for Hillary in November.

Have we ever seen such high dudgeon in the ship of state? On the stormy seas such treachery would be rewarded with the plank. This begs the answer to the question that many in the alt-right have been asking for a while now: Why is it that the ship of state only ever steers to port?

I would ask those who today consider themselves conservatives: What exactly are you still conserving?

A century ago, the average man in America would have had little intercourse with the representatives or the mandates of the state beyond perhaps when he visited the post office. Now he encounters Big Sister at every turn. Half or more of his daily bread is taken to fund the operations of Leviathan. In order to secure food and shelter with the remainder, both he and his wife must now sell their hours for wages. This requires that the benevolent state then raise his children from infancy, with the attendant weakening of family bonds this entails.

Above his head, the permanent ruling establishment is staffed almost exclusively by leftists, and those few thought criminals that remain who disagree with Cultural Marxism know to keep their views to themselves. Control of the schools and universities by leftists ensures that their ideological beliefs frame what is considered normal and respectable in society, and guarantees their growing dominance over time.

Please tell me, dear conservative friends: What have you conserved?

This failure of conservatism to prevent the left’s takeover of the West is what has driven the emergence of the alt-right. Despite Hillary’s attempts at caricature, the alt-right is not a frog. Neither is it the monolithic entity that goose-steps out of the fevered imaginations of transgender Social Justice Warriors in recently re-segregated campus dorms across the nation. It is an organic reaction to the degenerate and destructive program the left has relentlessly pushed upon the peoples of the West.

Hillary is correct, though, that this new movement from the right has emerged from the fringes of society. All effective counter-cultural movements do. This is where the deplorables all hang out. It is also where the ideas which are forbidden by the leftist establishment emerge, develop and organise. The alt-right does not have a single philosophy. Instead it is a multi-pronged intellectual attack upon the legitimacy of the ruling establishment in the West. This philosophical diversity is key to its strength.

There are several core tenets of alt-right thinking, however, which unify the different factions within the movement. Key to these is realism when it comes to race, gender, culture and beliefs. Despite the histrionics of the leftist establishment, these views have not been considered controversial historically. For everyone except postmodern Cultural Marxists, it is obvious that there are distinct differences between the races and between the sexes. Some cultures are obviously more successful at creating civilisation than others. If it is sexist that women bear the primary responsibility for raising progeny, then biology is sexist. If it is racist that East Asians have higher IQ’s, lower crime rates and higher incomes than Sub-Saharan Africans, then genetics is racist. Even if reality hurts your feelings, it’s still reality.

It has also been true throughout history that humans prefer their own tribe. Leftists today don’t mind ethnic nationalism, as long as it is not whites adopting it. Why is it that Black Lives Matter, a group associated with domestic terrorism who are clearly ethnic nationalists, are feted at the White House while white nationalists are profiled by the authorities and castigated in the media? Why is the demographic displacement of whites through mass immigration and the destruction of white cultures official government policy in Western countries? Why do we lambast this process as cultural genocide when it was done to indigenous peoples but celebrate it as diversity when it is done to whites?

Common across the component factions of the alt-right movement is also the belief that moral relativism and cultural universalism are destroying the West. Emerging over time from a distortion of the Christian principle of universal brotherhood, this practice by Westerners of denying themselves the right to in-group preference has emboldened our historical enemies and convinced them we are weak. Alt-right thinkers understand that all the aircraft carriers and ICBM’s in the world matter little if a society does not have the cultural confidence to assert its values and promote its identity to foreigners inside and outside its borders. Such a demoralized nation is not long for this world.

Many in the emerging right are former libertarians, and retain the views that the state is never to be trusted and that fascism and national socialism were movements of the left, not the right. The traditional right that these reactionary men and women would revive draws its ideas from such thinkers as Thomas Carlyle, Julius Evola, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. They reject majoritarian democracy and advocate formal hierarchy, moral order and the aspiration to higher ideals that metaphysical faith provides societies. They abhor the debased materialism and worship of abstract ideals that characterises modernity. Critics might dismiss this as mere nostalgia; it is not. Instead it is a love for one’s people and the desire to see them be great again. It is more than a political slogan. It is the rekindling of beliefs which many in the West have forgotten.

The alt-right is edgier than conservatism. It is more aggressive and assertive. That’s the point. Right-thinking men and women of the West now have nothing to lose. It is in such circumstances that minds are quickened and hearts are steeled. They see an establishment which is corrupt, degenerate and morally bankrupt. They are not at all interested in conserving it.

Moses Apostaticus is a PhD student with a background in classics, history and literature. His years in education have made him a lifelong enemy of leftism. He blogs at http://follyofreason.org.