Recently, Paul Ramsey published an excellent article here at ROK introducing the Alternative Right. While I sympathize with some of the goals of the alt right, I believe the movement as it is constituted today has serious weaknesses that will prevent it from succeeding.

Bona Fides

Because the alt right is such a new movement, it is at risk for being subverted (if that hasn’t happened already). Thus, I’ve noticed some alt righters are a little bit distrustful of people who say they are allies of the movement. To allay that realistic concern, I need to give you a little bit of my background.

I’m a first generation American. Both of my parents are European and my ancestors have all been Catholics for hundreds of years. In other words, I am 100% white by most people’s definition.

I come from a political family. On my mother’s side, my forebears were regional leaders. Both sides of my family were virulently anti-Marxist so it is no coincidence that I find myself battling the latest retread of Marxism in the form of SJWs.

Although I have not participated in any formal events that are associated with the alt right, I’ve been watching the movement for the past year. A perusal of my writing here at ROK and at my blog will show that I’ve been consistently supportive of nationalism, patriarchy, and tradition—ideas that align well with a large segment of the alt right.

My goal in writing is to help men move society in this direction. It is with this in mind that I highlight the following problems with the movement.

1. Lack of organization

Most of us are familiar with the story of the 300 Spartan warriors who made a stand against a Persian force numbering close to one million at the Battle of Thermopylae. Yet the secret to the Spartan’s fighting prowess was not that each man was an individual MMA badass, but that they were trained to fight as a coordinated unit in the phalanx formation. In other words, it was organization that made the Spartan armies great.

If a movement is tightly coordinated, even a small group of men can achieve disproportionate results. The Bolshevik takeover of Russia, the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, and even the American Revolution are examples of what can be done when relatively small groups of dedicated men work together.

One of the alt right’s biggest weaknesses is that it is an informal movement. Most of the movement’s followers preach its ideas on Twitter and 4chan. While there is some intellectual firepower behind the movement, its lack of formality makes it inconsequential when compared to the well-organized establishment parties.

2. Lack of a plan

Probably the biggest unifying principle in the alt right is the desire for an all white state, but there is no real plan to get there. I’ve seen some ideas floated, but they are not pleasant options. One is to await the inevitable collapse of the US as we know it today (i.e. it’s destruction). Presumably, those who are prepared can then strike out to form a new nation that does not repeat the same mistakes that the US made.

But there is no guarantee that the United States will collapse anytime soon. A more likely scenario is the US will evolve into a surveillance state to “protect us” from all the Muslim immigrants that are conveniently being allowed into the country.

A second, less frequently discussed option, is civil war that would lead to a white state. But the US still has the finest military in the world, and the controlling elites would have no problem slaughtering thousands of “right wing terrorists” to maintain their control. For sane people, any sort of bloodshed should be the option of last resort.

The lack of a serious plan to make things better leaves us with hope for something that may not happen in our lifetimes—or even in our children’s lifetimes.

3. Utopian view of white people

One of the best observations of the alt right is that you cannot divorce culture from race. If you replace all the Frenchmen in France with Arabs, it would no longer be France. If whites cease to be a majority in the US, the character of the country will change. Even the Italian and Irish immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries diminished the Anglo-Saxon character of the US. Filling the US with Central Americans will make the US more like Central America.

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But we should not be under any illusions that an all-white state would take us back to the late 1950s. White people have been conditioned for generations to oppose nationalism. Our public education system teaches that nationalism, the radical idea that a government should benefit its own people, inevitably leads to war and totalitarianism. That’s why when Trump proposed closing the borders to illegal immigration and limiting legal immigration, he was immediately attacked as being a new Hitler.

American whites have also been taught that they do not have any tradition. I once had a conversation with a teacher who was coordinating an “international day” at her school. She complained that she felt bad because the Africans, Pakistanis, Asians, and Indians had such rich cultures while her white American culture was “nothing.”

I had to explain to her that she was an inheritor of what is arguably the greatest culture in the world: Western culture. On top that, I pointed out that American culture is very distinctive and that it has a reputation for excellence. After all, it was the US that put a man on the moon.

For any nationalist movement to work in the US, the culture and all its institutions need to be reoriented to remove the self-loathing that whites have for themselves. The institutions must be changed to create citizens who are proud of their heritage, and who put the needs of their nation ahead of globalist concerns. This can’t be done with memes alone.

Without these changes, any success of the alt right would be short lived.

4. Inability to cause genuine harm to conservative establishment

In one of the forgettable Star Wars prequels, Darth Maul says: “At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi.” Emboldened by the Donald Trump campaign, many alt right people took to Twitter to engage the cuckservative establishment Jedi.

The cuckservatives immediately found that they were no match for the alt right. None of the usual thought-stopping epithets worked. The happy warriors of the alt right laugh at being called racists or Nazis. But while the establishment is not able to answer the alt right arguments using reason, they are now very aware of the existence of the alt right as a real force—and they are hell bent to crush it.

The establishment will use a three-prong approach. The first is to purge the alt right as being beyond the pale of the Conservative Movement. National Review, the primary organ of the Republicans, has dismissed alt right ideas as the ravings of “racist peckerwoods” who are “on the wrong side of history.” National Review even deletes the comments of their readers who agree with the alt right.

The purging of the alt right has been successful. Apart from Ann Coulter, not a single mainstream pundit is willing to defend alt right ideas.

The second step the establishment will use is to focus on stopping the candidacy of Donald Trump. While Trump himself is not a subscriber to the alt right, his promises to curb Mexican and Islamic immigration make him a champion to his alt right supporters.

The entire Republican establishment is working on defeating Trump’s nomination through funding anti-Trump ads and by procedural tricks that will make it more difficult for Trump to win the primaries. The GOP elite hope that if Ted Cruz can siphon off enough votes from Trump, it could open the door to a brokered convention where an establishment-approved candidate such as Jeb or Rubio could emerge with the nomination.

If these measures fail, it is likely that the GOP elite will run a third party donor-owned candidate to frustrate the democratic process and hand victory to Hillary or Bernie. A Trump defeat would land a demoralizing blow to the alt right. It would leave the movement with no political representation at any level.

The third step in suppressing the alt right is taking away its methods of communicating. The movement relies heavily on social media to spread its message, but Twitter has recently announced censorship rules that will make it easier to ban alt right accounts that are “offensive,” and thus severely limit any further growth.

The alt right prides itself on being younger and smarter than the GOP establishment, but at this point it looks like the stodgy establishment is poised to strangle the alt right.

5. Alienating and purging allies

There’s a saying on the alt right that runs, “No enemies to the right.” It is a reaction to the type of purging the mainstream conservative movement has engaged in. Despite this dictum, I see a lot of discussion in alt right circles excluding various people from the movement.

For example, I recently had a conversation with an Asian lady who has been in the US for over 40 years. She’s a big Trump supporter and she favors completely shutting down immigration. She agrees that whites are being marginalized by the current immigration policies. Far from being an proponent of diversity, she would actually prefer to live in a majority white country—after all, she left her own country for a reason.

Under certain understandings of the alt right, this woman, who is a natural ally, would be excluded while a white leftist like Rachel Maddow would be welcomed.

The purging is not limited to nonwhite allies. A small group of people associated with the alt right appear to even want to create a pecking order of white people using actual genetic test results. My guess is that this tendency is mostly coming from the 14/88 groups that Paul Ramsey referenced in his article.

In one case, I saw someone on Twitter cast aspersions at the Irish as being somehow beneath Anglo-Saxons and Nordics. Another person was fixated on German descent. His definition of being German was even more rigorous than what the National Socialists espoused.

Suffice it to say that any American movement that not only purges blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, but also segments of the white population is set to fail.

Conclusion

In the end the biggest problem with the alt right is that a portion of it is too idealistic. By setting the goal of an all white nation, it ignores the possibility of dramatically improving what we have now. Personally, I am unwilling to wait for decades for something that may never happen. Rather, the way forward is a turn toward nationalism using democratic means.

Read More: What Is The Alternative Right?