Rod Dreher, who has been wrong about so much of late, has a good post (comprised primarily of thoughtful reader comments) titled “Young Men, Faith, & Fascism”.
The gist of the piece surrounds attempts to understand why young white men are becoming attracted to the ‘Alt Right’, which Dreher and Company assume means ‘fascism’.
My thoughts on it are to forget the ‘Alt Right’ label. Boxing a wide array of non-liberal white men (and white women) into this increasingly useless category will get you nowhere in terms of understanding what is going on. The entire Left, and too many on the Right, have equated ‘Alt Right’ with ‘white supremacism’, ‘white nationalism’ or just as often ‘neo-Nazism’. This is misguided. Were there neo-Nazi LARP-ers at the C-ville rally? Yes there were. But they were greatly outnumbered by what we’d more accurately call young paleocons, seeking to preserve something. The views of the ‘Alt Right’ were the mainstream political views (across the political spectrum) just 50 or so years ago. Think about that.
There is a distinction between ‘white supremacism’ and ‘white identitarianism’, the latter simply being a form of identity politics, which is celebrated by every other demographic group in existence, not just in America but around the world. Such identity politics is a hard truth of history, always has and always will be. To not acknowledge this evolutionary group strategy element as being a fundamental part of human existence (e.g., social identity theory), to be the one ethnicity who pretends it does *not* exist or that it can be magically ‘transcended’ if we all just hold hands and try really hard, is a form of self-abasement and pathological altruism never before seen in human history.
When Trump’s Warsaw speech, a generic defense of ‘the West’ and all it has accomplished, is characterized by mainstream liberal pundits as coded ‘white supremacism’, this should tell you how far down the rabbit hole our P.C. culture has gone.
Using myself as an example: I am proud of the unique heritage of the West. This should be uncontroversial. I am also white. This too should be uncontroversial. Furthermore, it is an empirical fact that, from the ancient Greeks onward, ‘the West’ was built, nurtured, and (until the mid-1960s) demographically dominated by what we would call ‘whites’. To point this fact out should be uncontroversial. And yet when these points are collectively layered together, they suddenly become ‘controversial.’
Syllogistically, I can say that I am proud of my (empirically white) ancestors, which makes me the possessor of (gasp!) “white pride”. It is this element of syllogistic logic that smart young white kids are beginning to grasp.
And when the mainstream culture tells them they are awful racists for feeling that way, from grasping syllogisms like that, these young white kids rebel. They react against these Orwellian tropes from The Cathedral by flipping a middle finger, experiencing the joys trolling (one of their only available outlets), and deliberately saying things to offend delicate sensibilities.
It is these white kids who are the counterculture now.
They refuse to hate themselves, their heritage and their race.
