We are the Alternative Right

For some time now I have considered myself a Conservative, it was foolish of me to assume that the modern conservative movement was anything better than a joke. The ramblings of Michele Malkin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh should be enough to convince everyone that there is something mentally wrong with that crowd; the same crowd I had assumed was where I belonged. Fortunately there was still something not right to me, I did not fit in with the corporate-apologists, Christian fundamentalists, Constitutionalists (both the devout and hypocritical kind), and militarists.

Do not get me wrong there are many good people in that field whom I would never want to degrade in any way, they earned my respect through their dedication to the ideological beliefs which they professed. But simply because they are kind people with good intentions does not free them from attack, although the attacks will be made in a respectful manner. From them and the general idea of modern Conservatism I learned a lot, especially what is wrong with their entire ideology.

I am not referring in this post to the Objectivists who follow Ayn Rand; there is not anything in the world that could keep me from going nuclear spending more than ten minutes contemplating their thought. Instead I am referring to the general pragmatic conservatives, those who follow the same people who used Edmund Burke’s pragmatism to align themselves with their former enemies (the Classical Liberals) in the 19th century.

These more pragmatic conservatives are the ones I have a serious problem with. Do not get me wrong, I despise the Left in all the manners it presents its; Marxist, Socialist, Social-Democratic, Neoliberal, Neoconservative, Libertarian, and all those who subscribe to any form of Egalitarianism. But for a while it seemed to me the Conservatives, those who are somewhere between Neoconservative and Libertarian, were the people who followed the same philosophy that I had followed. This was a mistake.

Instead I sought to find something which I could truly relate to; however small the movement actually was, and try to finally find something that fit my tastes. No, it was not meant to find comfort with likeminded individuals; rather it was to find a place from which I could draw the nectar of that flower, which will grow my mind. After some time of reading, searching, and analyzing, I finally found something.

A great distinction within what would be called ‘Conservatism’ appeared to me. There were two types of ‘Conservatives’; the Pragmatists, as earlier mentioned, who became allies with their former enemies, the Liberals, and the Moralists, those who concluded that modernity was evil, not just made up of foolish men.

To understand the division you must go back 222 years to France. In it came the undoing of that era in European history; the French Revolution. Perhaps the most prominent conservative work on the revolution was Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflection on the Revolution in France’. In it he strongly criticized the Revolutionaries are foolish, subscribing to a radical ideology, filled with resentment, and inherently atheistic.

This school of conservatism is strange in itself as it came from a man who belonged to the most liberal party in the United Kingdom at the time, the Whigs. These were the men who either were outspoken in their support for the American Revolution against the British Monarchy or were quietly enthusiastic. The party which represented the urban areas and found its backing in the merchant class, to invent claim modern conservatism was created by a man from a liberal party is rather nonsensical if you look at it factually. If a proponent of conservative ideals were truly to arise at that time would he not come from the conservative party, the Tories?

Of course this path of conservatism would have ultimately led into a relationship of mutual aid between the merchant classes backed Liberals and the pragmatic Burkeans. Though, would that truly be conservatism or would it not be at best a liberal conservatism? Remember that when we speak of actual conservatism in the 18th and 19th centuries the aristocracy, nobility, peasantry, and monarchy all existed and were strong in Great Britain. The true conservatives at the time sided with the aristocracy, nobility, and monarchy, and received support from much of the rural peasantry. Yet the supposed conservatives, the only ones that you are taught about today, they sided with the liberalized intelligentsia, merchants, and urbanites.

As the revolutions spread across Europe the Burkeans viewed these Nationalists, Radical Liberals, Socialists, and Anarchists are foolish, those who would only inflict the problems onto themselves due to their own naivety. Meanwhile they turned their backs as the industrialists grew in power and influence, along with that grew the mass poverty of the urban workers who abandoned the farms which were losing wealth as industrialism became more of the center attention.

It was in 1853 England that the author John Ruskin penned ‘The Stones of Venice’ in which he wrote of the urban centers and mass industry:

“… and the great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach at them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can only be met by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

The problem of near savage businessmen, unsanitary cramped living conditions, long work hours, mass debt, and the dehumanization of the city itself that finally broke man’s spirit. It ruined him, demoralized him, and from that the peddlers of ideology arose. They fanned the resentment, class envy, and hatred that arose from the worker’s squalor, lifeless conditions. It was on this total destruction of man that a reaction to this horror arose, it was called Socialism. Essentially a cosmopolitan ideology, Socialism sought to unite all the disgruntled, poor masses that lived without any property to call their own. They are called to reject their national identity as the entire notion of it was an intentional oppression of the proletariat by the bourgeois; it was the great call to arms in the name, once again, of egalitarianism.

The same people whom Burkeans had intended to protect they dismissed as their relationship with the new middle class grew stronger. Rather than call for the unity of classes, cleaning up of living conditions, better treatment of the workers, and a return to the countryside, they sat on their hands. Due to having no one represent them, the Tories were busy defending the nobility and focusing on the peasantry and the Whigs were siding with the new middle class and merchants, they turned to Socialism.

As the Unionization, worker discontent, and socialist propaganda spread the Burkeans turned further to the Liberals, finally consolidating their long awaited alliance. Around the same time arose the ‘One Nation Conservatism’ of Benjamin Disraeli who attempted to bring together the laborers, peasants, nobility, and aristocracy, in rejection of the bourgeois and merchants; his attempt was a failure. But not a complete failure as he did improve the working conditions of many urban families, this proved too little too late.

Meanwhile in the United States the Burkean tradition had already suffered a great schism in the 1810s. Due to the influence of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans the Federalist Party collapsed by the early 1820s, shattering the sole conservative movement in America. Rising from the ruins was the Whig Party, dedicating itself to a Burkean conservatism with less of an elitist attitude than the Federalists. This time its alliance with the merchant class in America grew stronger, especially under the presidency of the liberal firebrand Andrew Jackson.

As he waged an all-out assault on the Second Bank of the United States this deeply angered the merchant class who backed the Whig Party, in turn the Whigs deeply despised the Jacksonian Democratic Party which had just begun. As the battle continued the Whigs lost the issue of the central bank but won their only two elections in the 1840s after the depression which ensued. But at the same time the Abolitionist movement was growing across the Northeast and Upper Midwest, with an emboldened part of the Whig Party wanting the federal government to ban all expansion of slavery westward, permanently.

The moderate Whigs disagreed with that sentiment but they were being split by the newly founded Know-Nothing Party which arose as a reaction to the recent mass immigration of Irish Catholics to the United States as a result of the potato famine. Swiftly the Whig Party collapsed, splitting off into three camps. The Abolitionists joined the newly formed Republican Party, nativists joined the Know-Nothing Party, and the rest of the Burkeans joined the Democratic Party.

When the Whig Party collapsed the Burkeans who resided within it became much more Liberal within the Republican Party, professing even stronger beliefs in business. The conservative spirit that was within Burkean conservatism in America had been shattered and spread among the newly dominating two parties; Democratic and Republican. Arguably most of the Burkeans joined the Republicans, as the Democrats in the north were mostly old fashioned farmers, poor laborers, and the Catholic and German immigrants.

As you bring this Burkean ideology forward into modern day it is clear that this is a morphed version of Conservatism and Classical Liberalism, fighting its enemy of the Socialistic Left. This fusion was finally accepted in the 1950s with the rise of the New Right in America to overthrow the more hard-line Southern and Midwest based Conservatism which arose out of a rejection of the Burkean-Liberal alliance.

These modern conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney in America are the Burkeans or, Liberal Conservatives. The Burkeans dominate all the mainstream conservative movements in the West, people such as Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Merkel, Rasmussen, and Cameron are all examples of the Burkean tradition.

However this is not the only version of ‘Conservatism’ that lived, there were the Moralists who were mostly Continental Catholics that went much further in their criticism of not only the French Revolution but all the ideals which they say it spawned. For instance, rather than proclaim the consequences of the Revolution in France were just the expected results of foolish revolutionaries, they proclaimed that the Reign of Terror for instance was actually God’s retribution for destroying the divinely sanctioned ancien régime.

Joseph de Maistre is perhaps the most widely known of them, even though he is known by very few, and those who often know of him have very little positive statements to make on his behalf. Giving one example of de Maistre’s writing on the French Revolution:

“Now what distinguishes the French Revolution and makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically bad. No element of good disturbs the eye of the observer; it is the highest degree of corruption ever known; it is pure impurity.
On what page of history will you find such a great quantity of vices assembled at one time on the same stage? What a horrible assemblage of baseness and cruelty! What profound immorality! What absence of all decency!”

It could be easy to summarize the Moralists, along with the Romanticists who joined them, as the true founders of the entire position of anti-modernity. They opposed the Enlightenment entirely, to them it was nothing more than a radical movement against Christianity, tradition, and European civilization, led by sophists and the newly emerging merchant class to overthrow the entire conception of the world as it opposed their conception of it. Not only was this a war over religion in general but it was also a war of worldviews.

Among the Enlightenment followers the held in esteem the values of rationalism, secularism, liberalism, democracy, social contract, egalitarianism, and universalism. Nothing could be more repulsive to the traditionalist at the time, men who watched as not only their countries went up in flames but their leaders beheaded, religion persecuted, friends executed en masse, and watched an entire new type of men arise in their homelands, men who might as well have been completely foreign strangers.

Yet, instead of arguing that the French traditionalists begin an immediate counterrevolution de Maistre declared that the French must suffer under the weight of their own revolution, they must watch blood flow in the street, the government exterminate all that they knew, and conscripted into a war on the side of a nation they never knew before and most never supported, viewing it instead as alien.

Louis Bonald was another Frenchman who had expressed the Moralist position, which was based on the divine origin of language. He concluded that the first language contained all that is true, from this he deduced that God exists, the Holy Scriptures are supreme authority, and that the Catholic Church is infallible. From this same understanding he also defended theocracy, monarchy, nobility, aristocracy, and all of the cornerstones of feudal Europe.

The ideas of these men did live on, although much less influential over time than the Burkeans. They attempted to hold together the crumbling institutions of Medieval Europe during the 19th century which were under full-scale assault by first the Liberals, then the Socialists who arose out of a reactionary version of Liberalism. What held these ideas together though was their rigid advocacy of egalitarianism, although their record of it is questionable, to say the least.

By the mid-19th century almost no philosophers arose to carry their torch except one single statesman, Klemens von Metternich. He was the foreign minister of the Holy Roman Empire and its successor state of the Austrian Empire from 1809 through 1848 when the Revolutions that swept through Europe threw him out of power, ruining his life’s work, and leaving him in absolute depression until his death in 1859.

In the early 20th century however a new group of Moralists arose out of the Burkean Liberalism, seeing that there were inherent flaws in the ideology and a strange insanity within the people who espouse it. G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were these two men, both Catholic apologists and together they created the economic system of Distributism from their interpretation of Catholic social teachings and Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum:

“Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”

G.K. Chesterton refused to be labeled a conservative for a very specific reason and remained much more moderate than the other Moralists who came before him. He accepted democracy, although limited, and was not particularly an advocate of a strengthening of the aristocracy and nobility. Instead he fought for a reform of the economic system; replacing unions with guilds to unite the classes, favor credit unions over banks, abolish all usury (i.e. interest rates), breakup the large corporations, create worker co-operatives so workers have more investment in their work, and encourage a return to independent economic stability which comes from owning your own small business, becoming a craftsman, or a farmer. One of his wittiest quotes was:

“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes, the business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

Hilaire Belloc however became famous for helping create Distributism and for writing the book, ‘The Servile State’. In this book he argued that from the chaos created by laissez-faire capitalism in order to subdue the rise of socialism the merchant class and government will organize together to create a servile state which would create what we now know of as the ‘welfare state’. This welfare state would be established not too large where it drains the profit of the merchants but not too small that the poor would rise up against them; people could be angered but would remain subdued. It is the same general system that used to be implemented for the relations between slaves and slaveholder to keep the slaves alive and complacent.

However the First World War created a new generation of Moralist oriented philosophers, most notably Julius Evola. Although generally labeled a ‘Fascist’ by those on the Left he never once joined the Italian Fascist Party, often wrote against the Mussolini regime, disliked Hitler, and argued that we are living in modernity. This period of time is noted as a time of unrestrained vices, nihilism, and decadence known as the ‘Kali Yuga’ in Hindu Scriptures.

Evola embodied the spirit of masculine, aristocratic, and elitist traditionalism. He believed that in every civilization around the world the universal truth was revealed, generally through religion, and each religion was designed to interpret that universal truth for the specific people of a specific culture. However to him that universal truth had died, specifically in the West, and with it so did the entire civilization that had for thousands of years followed the codes laid out by that universal truth. From the Greco-Roman culture of classical antiquity until the Age of Enlightenment; European civilization held onto these beliefs but then suddenly rejected them.

His view was that Christianity had fallen from its grace and there was no more need for ‘conservatism’ in this regard as all conservatism is just Christians trying to hold onto a time which needs to be abandoned anyway. Christianity had degenerated into a religion of weakness, femininity, liberal democracy, capitalism, and advocacy equality; all values of bourgeois which Evola reviled. For him the bourgeois, middle class and merchants, held onto materialistic values that generally made them inferior and subordinate to the aristocratic and noble class.

In the United States however the creation of a Moralist-aligned conservatism begun during the interwar period as an opposition to the spread of industrialization into the agrarian South, creation of the New Deal, and the general liberalization of the country under the new intellectual elite that arose from the Wilson administration and enthroned itself in the Roosevelt administration. These men split between Traditionalist Christianity, like Russell Kirk, and Nietzschean Irreligion, like H.L. Mencken.

From this the United States experienced the rise of Paleoconservatives, as they later named themselves in the 1980s, who struggled for control over the conservative movement with the Burkean-Liberal Neoconservatives that came into power under Ronald Reagan. With them the Republican Party became consolidated as a conservative party with the Burkean-Liberals taking over control from the (formerly) influential Paleoconservatives such as Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming, and Patrick Buchanan (after 1992).

For me I had spent time embracing a failed Burkean conservatism that was obsessed with holding onto a society that needs to be crushed and replaced with a genuinely conservative order. In this argument I am no longer a conservative, that must be abandoned, instead I have become a Moralist-aligned Reactionary. Not to suggest that I agree with everything people like Joseph de Maistre, Louis Bonald, François-René de Chateaubriand, Klemens von Metternich, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming, Russell Kirk, and H.L. Mencken said, rather I agree with the philosophical current that runs through all of them.

These ideas will not be particularly liked by members here at ATS for obvious reasons, such as with conspiracy theories comes the general distrust of most or all governing authority. But to understand the Moralist position you have to remove yourself from any acceptance of Modernity, your eyes cannot view the world as the majority does. If, or when, you do this then the entire understanding of Moralism can legitimately be debated but if you are arguing over government and society as it exists today then no amount of Moralist based politics can change anything.

For Moralism to work Modernity must come to its close, whether it is brought to its close by Moralism or Moralism arises out of the ashes of Modernity, either way I can safely say in a very non-conservative way; Modernity must end.

Giving my thread a bump.

Originally posted by Misoir
I despise the Left

We love you too.

Originally posted by Misoir
The problem of near savage businessmen, unsanitary cramped living conditions, long work hours, mass debt, and the dehumanization of the city itself that finally broke man’s spirit. It ruined him, demoralized him, and from that the peddlers of ideology arose. They fanned the resentment, class envy, and hatred that arose from the worker’s squalor, lifeless conditions. It was on this total destruction of man that a reaction to this horror arose, it was called Socialism.

Sounds like Capitalism to me.

Originally posted by Misoir
For me I had spent time embracing a failed Burkean conservatism that was obsessed with holding onto a society that needs to be crushed and replaced with a genuinely conservative order. In this argument I am no longer a conservative, that must be abandoned, instead I have become a Moralist-aligned Reactionary. Not to suggest that I agree with everything people like Joseph de Maistre, Louis Bonald, François-René de Chateaubriand, Klemens von Metternich, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming, Russell Kirk, and H.L. Mencken said, rather I agree with the philosophical current that runs through all of them.

How about a post clearly explaining how you feel about the rest of us?

reply to post by gentledissident


Why should I waste my time? It is of no importance to me anyone else’s side beyond studying its philosophical argument to better know the enemy. I do not see how a post dedicated to giving my opinion about your side is remotely necessary. If people knew about all of the men I listed as inspirations to me on here then they would understand with absolute clarity my feeling towards all of the Left.

Originally posted by Misoir
reply to post by gentledissident

 

Why should I waste my time? It is of no importance to me anyone else’s side beyond studying its philosophical argument to better know the enemy. I do not see how a post dedicated to giving my opinion about your side is remotely necessary. If people knew about all of the men I listed as inspirations to me on here then they would understand with absolute clarity my feeling towards all of the Left.

It would be a waste of my time to read about those men. You have spent a lot of time putting together this thread, but I feel it was wasted because I still don't know your personal point of view.

Nice post - But I fear that until there is a proper universally understood metaphysics of what we are as humans and our purpose in this universe, we will always be subject to endless false versions that can be used to divide and conquer us - religions, isms, osophies - we simply don't know, and cannot agree who we are.

Misoir could you please make a tl;dr version?

Thanks in advance.

reply to post by gentledissident


My personal point of view is that of the alternative right, the Moralists. To sum up my beliefs would basically say reactionary. The Hitler types are not in our group because they were populists that adhered to a nationalist oriented socialism and focused on biological racism, i.e. accepted Modernity/materialism. We, including myself, focus instead of metaphysics and on transcendent interpretations of the world.

There are two types, the individualists (different from modern interpretation of individualism) and the religionists. I myself fall halfway between both, for me religion is important but we must also incorporate a strong emphasis on individual excellence. Many of the individualists were sympathetic, not usually supportive, of Mussolini’s Fascism in its early stages until it made a deal with the papacy, believed in a continuous revolution, and removed itself from the earlier emphasis on spiritual purification of the nation through heroism and masculinity.

I am more anti-democratic than G.K. Chesterton, much less theocratic than Joseph de Maistre, less nihilistic than Friedrich Nietzsche, and more religious than Julius Evola. I can read the works of Communists and find points of agreement, read works of Fascists and find points of agreement, read works of Theocrats and find points of agreement, and in general can take from many extremes of the political left-right.

Basically I am opposed to conservatism, liberalism, socialism, capitalism, the proletariat and bourgeois, egalitarianism, materialism, and the plutocracy. I am however in favor of reactionary politics, traditionalism, communitarianism, Distributism, the aristocracy and nobility, hierarchy, traditionalist Christianity, and autarky.

reply to post by Rockdisjoint


If this is too long for you to read then it probably is not of interest to you anyway.