Over the course of numerous years now I have been trying to make sense of the right-leaning and the right-reactionary pole within the political spectrum. Clearly, in my case, this was a necessary reaction to my own hyper-liberal California upbringing and with that I refer to the decades of the 70s and the 80s principally. These decades in American culture and in the sense I feel that is important stem out of the 1960s. I became aware of the degree to which I was a ‘product’ of 60s radicalism but in the sense that the entire culture, in one way or another, responded to and reacted to this influence.
A book that came my way some years back was Robert Bork’s ‘Slouching Toward Gomorrah’ which came out of the American Conservative camp in the 1980s more or less. It is a very interesting and critical book (it takes a critical position against Sixties radicalism) which is useful, but insufficient, as a starting point for the recovery of a ‘true conservative perspective’. Actually, I was influenced by Noam Chomsky in considering the word ‘conservative’ because he mentioned once that the present conservatives cannot realy be considered as such. The Founding Fathers of the American Republic, therefor, were to be held up as the real conservatives according to his view. But, given that Chomskly is in essence a communist (the actual meaning of Anarcho-Socialist) I cannot see how he could have, in the end, anything but a critical position vis-a-vis these Founders. The entire American Project would have to be seen by him as defective and, of course, it really is.
But what has become very interesting to me is to attempt to assemble a definition of what ‘conservative’ actually means. First, the present and so-called conservatives (that is, of the Reagan-conservative stripe) cannot in my view be considered truly conservative. But in making that assessment one essentially makes a critical statement about the nature of the US Neo-Imperialism and a directing, ruling, business class. When one begins to analyze that (their) position one quickly discovers that that position is a complex one that is tied intimately with the subversion of the original republican values and that this subversion ties back to the emergence of a concentrated national power that arose as a result of the Northern invasion of the South in the Civil War. This was an imperialistic war or the beginning of a peculiar tendency of invasion and assertion which started then but has also continued. In this view, the Phillipine War and the Spanish American War (the invasion and occupation of the Phillipines and of Cuba) began a process by which the original values of a confederated republic, and the democratic machinery which can make such a republic function, were subverted. And they were subverted through war-making enterprises.
In our present, these enterprises have expanded a thousand or a million-fold. In order to understand, then, ‘our present’ but from an American perspective, and of course ‘the Americanopolis’ which might involve the perspective of someone outside of this American System, that is, a meta-political perspective that would be critical of such an Americanopolis (to quote Pierre Krebs), requires some sort of perspectival point from which to make the anaylsis. What shall be and what can be that point of perspective?
This is a labyrinthian question of course when it is taken in its entirety. But the fact is that this
Americanopolis has had and is still having a vast an disproportionate influence on all affairs in our 20th and 21st Century modernity. Therefor, an analysis and understanding of this influence (the word Americanopolis will have to suffice) is not only important but crucial. One cannot do without it. And, one has to then make decisions about where one stands in relation to it.
Some part of these reflections have come about as I began an interesting book titled ‘Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement. And Paramilitary America’ by Kathleen Belew (Harvard, 2018). Her thesis is very interesting. That it is to the Vietnam War that one can trace the origins of a modern ‘white power movement’. That is, returning soldiers who were thoroughly disillusioned by that war, saw themselves as having been used and betrayed by the government they trusted and believed in, and who then turned against that governing power in varying degrees and with varying intensity. Similar to those who were radicalized toward the left and the progressive-left (as for example in Stone’s movie Born One The Fourth Of July), those who became radicalized to the Right returned with a radically jaundiced view of America and the ‘power structure’ but began an activism within the radical and fringe White Power Movement(s).
See for example
Louis Beam who became on of the ‘fathers’ of the Christian Identity Movement.
Now, with all that said, we are in a better position to see the phenomenon of Donald Trump and to understand why the ‘Establishment’ (the NYTs for example, CNN and many other establishment news-providers, as well as the ‘Deep State’ and their Intelligence operatives : essentially the financial and governmental structure of the US) is so opposed to the resurgence of a populist white power movement. And it is relevant to use the term ‘white power’ and ‘white identity’ because, according to this view and their view (that of this radical popular white-identitarian right), America is defined as a ‘white country’. Founded by Whites and, if you will, invented by Whites. What is interesting is to hear their descriptions of what has happened, why it has happened, and what it means.
Jumping ahead a bit (because Louis Beam was active in the 70s and 80s), we now become aware of another octave of a White Identity Movement. One can for example review the many different interviews on Red Ice Radio (YouTube) to see their interviews with the ‘old school activists’, for example David Duke. Duke was of course allied with the Klan but left it. Yet he is definitely part of a White patriotic movement and also that of Christian Identity. My view is that these people are ‘original Americans’ and not deviant Americans. What I mean by that is not that, to us now, their views do not seem deviant to us (they may or they may not) but rather that it is our modernity and shifting ideas of what is right and wrong, good and bad, which have overtaken this older ‘old school’ America.
What is peculiar, and in relation to the Vietnam War, is how the *narratives* get all confused. For example, these radical White Identity activists, numerous of whom served in Vietnam and were radicalized there, became ultra-disillusioned that they were supposedly fighting communists but that communistic and socialized processes were then manifesting themselves in their own country. That is, that left-progressive radical ideologies began to become mainstream in certain ways. Thus, they fought against ‘communism’ in a far off land but domestically became the *victims* of such odeologies and policies at home. The Left, too, developed similar narratives, but structured identity (American identity that is) on a multi-cultural and pan-racial model. So that in their view to have fought in Vietnam but then returned to a country in which they did not see themselves as full participants led to a radicalization of ‘alternative identity’ politics: Black, Latino, American Indian, etc.
Strange really that the processes of war recoil against the one waging war. I suppose this is a common theme in history excep that in our history it is infinitely more ideological, more politicized. Now, ideas and ideology are interfaces between ourselves and the *reality* that transpires and which, with great difficulty, we attempt to interpret. But whose interpretation is valid? Which one will hold? Which one will win the day?
Therefor, the essence of the conflicts of our present, within the Americanopolis and also outside of it where interpretation must also take place, there is a tremendous narrative confusion. This is dramatic and dangerous.
But the Structure itself, that is the economic and governing structure which includes vast business interests, media systems, international interests and the influence of the Americanopolis within an international setting, has its own designs and interests and these are not in any sense ‘popular interests’. That is, they are not really the interests of States and their inhabitants (as in the sovereign states that were federated in the original design), but rather the interests of an evolution of a powerful National American Government which has become, bit by bit, a bizarre war-making entity and as Chomsky accurately points out one intimately tied to a ‘Pentagon economic and industrial complex’.
In my own view, I see the events of 9/11 as having been undertaken by forces hard to see and name. Because ‘it’ cannot be seen and ‘it’ is by nature invisible, one is led to try to visualize it, but one cannot do that with precision. One *projects* therefor according to the content of one’s imagination and imagination-perception. And so again the *world* cannot really be seen. What one sees is one’s *imagined world* an idea I find fascinating.
My understanding is that *most people* cannot see their world, and cannot see the American present, and indeed they cannot really see The Present in any full sense. They see glimpses through a chink. The best maetaphor is that of Plato’s Cave (as a way to illustrate being in darkness). They have very partial view. But if that is true of the physical manifestation of *reality* as we now understand reality, how much more confused and difficult to see is any world-beyond-this-world. That is, how much more impossible is it really to conceive of *metaphysical structures*.