The great political realignment we are experiencing is due in large part to demographics, but there are other factors at work. The age in which most of us grew up in was formed by the two great industrial wars and the long Cold War between Bolshevism and liberal democracy. The Cold War is over, the demographic age is upon us and we are well into the post-industrial age of society. As a result, the political arrangements of the old age are slowly giving way to a new politics that will reflect the divisions of this age.

There are at least three camps now, maybe more. One is the new Progressive camp that believes the brown tide will wipe away the white culture and replace it with something that has yet to be explained. The opposition to that is where the demographic and race realists are congregating. Like the former, it is not all that well defined ideologically. Then there is the large group of people, mostly white, who remained trapped in the mental framework of the past era. These are the normies our side endeavors to convert.

People on our side of the great divide talk a lot about this last group, but we don’t spend a lot of time getting to know them. The clever boys of social media invest a lot of effort into coming up with clever memes to either scandalize the normies or red pill them. Sometimes they do both with unpredictable results. The NPC meme, for example. More important, I don’t think our side spends enough time contemplating just how difficult it is for these people to even make it to the water’s edge, much less commit to crossing over to our side.

That came to mind when reading some of the responses to my Letter to the CivNats post a couple of weeks ago. More than a few commenters here fell back on the old lines you hear from people like Ben Shapiro. Others fretted that the gap between Left and Right has become dangerously wide. This post from Robert Stacy McCain was what got me thinking about the normies. His post is actually a post about a post, where he sort of summarizes me and then turns back to the old civic nationalism. In the build up he writes:

“I assume my readers to be intelligent, sane and mature, capable of evaluating facts for themselves, and unlikely to suddenly go join the Klan because of some article they read on the Internet. Joining the tiki-torch brownshirt parade is a bad idea, and I should hope my readers don’t need to be cautioned against this.”

What struck me about it, is I read heretical bad thinkers like me every day and I never think of them as evil. I don’t think of myself as a dangerous heretic, even though I’m well aware of my heresy. As far as I know, no one reading me has joined the KKK, donned a brown shirt or taken up with Old Scratch. Yet, people who still find Gavin McInness edgy do think people on our side are dangerous. They do worry that even limited exposure will cause them to burst into flames. They really do worry that we deal in the black arts.

A point that cannot be made enough is just how scary it is for most normal white people to contemplate their future, even when they accept our demographic reality. Later in his post, McCain writes, “The prospect of a “permanent majority” alliance on the Left that disturbs ZMan is, indeed, a cause for concern. But despair is not a strategy. If we wish to summon to our banner all men of goodwill, we must be able to persuade them that we have hope of a better future. How about this: Discredit the institutions of the decadent elite.”

This is where most normal white people have been trained to veer from the road to reality into the lotus fields of multicultural delusion. Reading that line, I expected Ben Shapiro to pop up on my screen, lecturing me about how a nation is defined by its ideology, rather than the complexion of the people in it. It is that mental block that so many white people have which prevents them from taking the next step in their chain of logic. If the Left is going to be an explicitly anti-white coalition, then our side needs to be….libertarians!

Now, in fairness to Robert Stacy McCain, I don’t know much about him. He could be /ourguy/, but working as a missionary in the land of the normie. He could be a super normie guy who is struggling with the changing world around him. He could have been bitten by the werewolf of race realism and is starting to turn. I have some recollection of him being quoted by gentry conservatives, but I could be mistaken. He’s not the topic here, just a jumping off point to illustrate a larger point about white people.

For as long as anyone reading this has been a live, white people have been marinating in a poaching liquid of self-loathing. To root for your own team has been defined as the worst imaginable evil. The result is a mental block that operates like a great barrier in the mind, that always causes normie to return to where he started. More important, beyond that barrier, the place on the map that reads, “Here there be monsters”, is the land where the bad people dwell. To cross the barrier, means never coming home again.

That’s an important thing our side needs to grasp. For most white people, individualism, civic nationalist, anti-racism and so forth are what define their life as a citizen. To abandon those things would be the same as moving to another country. People do walk away from the friends and family to start new lives. Many of the people reading this have ancestors they knew, who left the old familiar to become Americans. For most Americans, though, this is the destination, so leaving it is like abandoning the point of their life.

The reality is, America is going to be a majority- minority country, at least while it remains a country. There is no changing that demographic reality. Robert Stacy McCain is right about “summoning men of goodwill to our banner.” We will need numbers to contend with the rising brown tide that threatens the West. It’s the “goodwill” part that our side must always keep in mind. Converting these normies is about convincing them that rooting for your own team is the moral thing to do, the thing men of goodwill do. That’s our challenge.