Indulge me in a brief anecdote from my youth. When you take to the water off the shores of populated areas in Africa, even if you started at a nice ‘beach club,’ you’ll still find that dilapidated shacks, shoddy buildings and slums are never too far from sight. I know it wasn’t a fair comparison, but it made sense to me at the time to throw this against what I saw boating in America; rich green lawns curving down from graceful old homes to the beach, forest and rocks against the surf, little rippling American flags, sometimes the sleek lines of a Coast Guard cutter or the intimidating bulk of navy cruisers.
The wind and lines rip around your head and your heart rejoices in the knowledge that it’s your inheritance, the land of your fathers, better than everywhere else. (incidentally, people like Hanania’s moronic cargo cult aping of my culture because he thinks coastal liberals are ‘high status’ drives me up the wall).
I’ve been an American nationalist and dyspeptic immigration restrictionist in one form or another from the beginning. Travel isn’t the only thing that inspires this. Like many members of my generation I suspect, I was devouring dark internet blogs long before I started reading actual history.
Looking at the world as a precocious autodidact, the actually very valuable resources of the Academy and published history seemed automatically suspect by association with Wokeness and the Democrats; Moldbug told it like it is about IQ differences, therefore I could trust him to give me the unvarnished truth about my own country’s history as well. Moldbug is only one example of the tendency I’m about to sketch out, I experienced it as the ‘alt right’ party line of the 2015-2016 period, and although I accepted it uncritically at the time it caused me a considerable amount of angst and anomie.
An Alt-Right History - America the Great Satan
In the classic Alt-Right historical narrative, the post-1960s ideological turn of American society is retroactively cast back to the nation’s founding. The 1960s only represented an intensification of what had always been the dominant strain in American public life. The fact that presidents from Wilson to Roosevelt fought for and defended global white supremacy is downplayed in favor of messianic pronouncements they made about democracy. The founding fathers’ restriction of citizenship to white men was just an unfortunate compromise they had to make on the road to their real dream of global racial egalitarianism.
It’s a mirror image, or in dovetail with the popular whig history of America taught in school and at college, and has an ambivalent relationship with the revolutionary leftist narrative that casts America as a land of white-settler villains. I won’t get into its intellectual origins but only describe the general view of American history it inculcates in its young adherents. This is what public schools teach and internet bloggers were very happy to pick it up uncritically and reverse the value judgments, or supplement it with lines about spies in the Roosevelt administration.
America, internet bloggers and POLISCI101 told us, had no organic right wing tradition. The American Right were maybe some libertarian pamphleteers like Albert Jay Nock and then William F. Buckley. America’s main tradition is rootless neoliberalism, “the business of America is business,” we might as well have been putting rainbow flags on our embassies from the very beginning. American rightists looking for predecessors, heroes, or societies to emulate are encouraged to look at Wilhelmine Germany, Ancien Regime France, or the Francoists in Spain.
I was consequently despondent about my own future and my entire society. Putting aside its historical merits, the natural consequences of this belief are a kind of pine tree gang turning on tuning in and dropping out. I imagined a life for myself as a yeoman plumber striving to be separate from the system and develop his own clan with the remnants of his traditional Catholic beliefs from the old country. If America was the rainbow flag, and esoterically always had been, then I could have no part of it…something new would hopefully one day rise, till then I would have to labor like Augustine in Rome, renouncing the civic rituals of my fathers, inextricably wedded as they were to global wokeness.