Defeat Racism by Heightening the Contradictions

Dialogue as a way to keep smart people away from the far right

My conversation with Jared Taylor earlier this month has opened up a schism among his white nationalist supporters.

I was amused to find out that he began his last two American Renaissance podcasts by apologizing to his audience. Bizarrely, he said one of the reasons he regretted his comments was that he was talking to me, someone who has contempt for white people, which is something I haven’t heard before. Sure, you could argue that I have contempt for racial collectivists or the dysfunctional underclass of any background, but I haven’t heard anyone say I have particular animus towards whites. This is perhaps a way to calm his supporters down.

Regardless, what this entire episode demonstrates is that there is a deep contradiction at the heart of white nationalism, the dissident right, or whatever you want to call it.

There are basically two kinds of people within these circles.

The relatively Elite Human Capital faction is secular, hierarchical, and scientific in its outlook. It reads studies about racial differences in IQ, the importance of heredity, and crime statistics. It is of course selective in the evidence it focuses on, like all political movements are, ignoring for example the overwhelming contribution that immigrants make to the United States. But these are basically smart people who care about ideas. They often went to elite schools, and have in many cases had success outside of the movement. Taylor, for example, graduated from Yale, and, having grown up in Japan and written about it, was in the 1980s considered an expert on that country in the mainstream press.

There is also a Low Human Capital faction, which predominates among the audience, that is simply racist in the most primitive sense. They are egalitarians and don’t want snooty elites telling them what to do. They don’t read and are often religious, though more in a tribal than a truly spiritual sense. The world is frightening to them, and they are hostile to liberals and minorities because they represent uncertainty and change. They are often stupid and maladjusted, and have nothing to fall back on except the accomplishments of their race, which they demand credit for. While Jared Taylor spent part of his life comfortably in elite circles, his audience is composed of people who latch onto their identity out of a desperate need to maintain some sliver of self-esteem.

Newest senator from West Virginia

This is a recurring tension on the far right. There’s a fascinating biography I once read of William L Pierce called The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds by Robert Griffin, which you can find here. Pierce received a PhD in physics from Caltech in 1962, before becoming a professor at Oregon State University. He left academia and in 1974 began the National Alliance. Pierce was really into eugenics. He had contempt for Christianity and at one point tried to create a new religion called “Cosmotheism,” focused on the need for whites to become biologically enhanced and more cultured versions of themselves. Yet while adopting a worldview that stressed the best qualities of the white race, a major concern of his life was the fact that his movement kept attracting people he referred to as “defective.”

This problem keeps popping up because the two forms of white nationalism don’t agree on much except excluding immigrants and eliminating all vestiges of DEI in culture and government. So you go to the American Renaissance website, and you’ll read story after story about Islamic terrorism and black crime. That’s very unifying, because EHC and LHC whites can both find something to like here. Jared normally remains silent, however, about the problems of the white underclass, and asking about them did a service by bringing to the forefront his differences with his fans.

In his first podcast apologizing for what he said about West Virginians, Jared also admitted that he wouldn’t care if making America more white led to a decline in living standards. I appreciate his honesty, which is what makes him more worthy of engagement than most in these circles. But telling people you will make them poorer, or even that you’re indifferent to their material wants and needs, is not the most effective way to recruit them to your movement.

Jared bending the knee to the chuds is bound to be bad for his ability to attract Elite Human Capital to his cause. When intelligent people start to move towards the far right, it is usually because they are hostile to egalitarianism and believe that society doesn't do enough to encourage and celebrate greatness. They wonder how we went to the moon generations ago but now can’t even keep the homeless from camping out on the streets; are disgusted by things like Afrocentric curriculums that denounce science and logic as white supremacist inventions; and wonder why so many resources go towards trying to help the most useless human beings instead of focusing on the best or the greater good of society as a whole.

They don’t want to be told that they need to fight for a white majority just so they can be poorer and spend all their efforts trying to uplift morbidly obese Appalachians who put Mountain Dew in the bottles of their babies. Some people find the idea of more gifted members of society sacrificing for the worst among us appealing. But such individuals already have a home on the left. Once you’ve accepted this moral outlook and demand that people consider members of the dysfunctional underclass their “brothers and sisters,” it is bizarre to maintain a racially exclusionary outlook.

I think that Jared would acknowledge that white identitarianism doesn’t currently attract the best people, and it would be better for his movement if that would change. Yet rightist ideas on identity don’t only appeal to the lower classes in America. This is a nearly universal pattern. Smart people want to feel like they’ve figured something out, that due to their intelligence and virtue they’ve adopted an accurate and moral worldview. Once you create a movement based on identity rather than ideas, you’re putting out the bat signal for every loser in the world who has nothing in his own life that he can take pride in. And if you yourself are not a loser, once you’ve taken a look at the quality of people you’ve attracted, it should become clear that a shared racial heritage alone cannot form a rational basis for political activism.

I was surprised by how often in our conversation Jared would return to the argument that blacks and Hispanics have their own ethnic organizations, he just wishes whites had the same right. Yet smart white people aren’t going to be won over with a message that they can reach the moral and intellectual stature of Al Sharpton.

Ignoring white identity politics has tended not to work. But a brief conversation with Jared Taylor was enough to reveal the fundamental contradiction at the heart of his movement. Dialogue may not be the best way to reach Low Human Capital, but I’m convinced that it can help higher quality people understand that there is nothing for them on the identitarian right.