The Intellectual Rot at the Heart of the Beltway Right

The conservative movement has a bold new strategy for victory: complain about white “racism.” Someone named Ian Tuttle is complaining about the Alt Right in an article called “The Racist Moral Rot at the Heart of the Alt Right” in National Review. In Mr. Tuttle’s musings, there’s an undertone of earnest despair, which raises the depressing possibility that he may actually believe what he is saying.

The cause of Mr. Tuttle’s angst is a recent report by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos on the Alt Right at Breitbart. Breitbart has covered this emerging intellectual and political movement in a relatively objective manner. The authors seem to have tried to understand their subject and report what they have found, something almost unprecedented in modern journalism. The reaction from the Beltway Right has been hysteria.

Mr. Tuttle’s article is an extended display of anti-white virtue of the kind that delights the multi-culti Left. At the same time, it is Exhibit A for why the Alternative Right is, in fact, right, and why whites who want to live in a First-World nation so desperately need it.

Mr. Tuttle accuses the Alt Right of opposing the triumph of “liberal democracy” and “classical liberalism as such.” Yet, his only evidence for this is that the Alt Right dissents on race–not that it wants to institute theocracy, central planning, Oriental despotism, or anything else he believes is opposed to “liberal democracy.” Mr. Tuttle seems to think that anyone who rejects current racial orthodoxies–orthodoxies that have prevailed for only 50 years or so–becomes a sworn enemy of “classical liberalism,” the Constitution, and all things good and beautiful. It is as if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the supreme achievement of 2,500 years of Western Civilization, and that anyone who disagrees is barely human.

“Minicons” like Mr. Tuttle, to use Prof. Paul Gottfried’s term for them, often claim they are “classical liberals,” but those who actually have some familiarity with the history of American conservatism know that thinkers as varied as Richard Weaver, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and other figures once celebrated by “conservatives” questioned core principles of the Enlightenment. And if the terms Left and Right mean anything, the former refers to those who hold equality as their highest value, whereas the latter refers to those who recognize hierarchy. It is strange, indeed, that Mr. Tuttle is outraged by the Alt Right’s rejection of “egalitarianism.”

Mr. Tuttle is outraged by the heresies of racial consciousness as expressed by Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer. He writes: “Taylor’s ‘race realism,’ for example, co-opts evolutionary biology in the hopes of demonstrating that the races have become sufficiently differentiated over the millennia to the point that the races are fundamentally–that is, biologically–different. Spencer, who promotes ‘White identity’ and ‘White racial consciousness,’ is beholden to similar ‘scientific’ findings.”

One can’t help pitying anyone who puts scare quotes around the word “scientific.” It is more likely that the world is 4,000 years old, or that the Prophet Mohammad split the moon, or that Odin built the world out of the bones of a dead giant, than that different populations didn’t become biologically different over the millennia. In his eagerness to demonstrate his orthodoxy, Mr. Tuttle took the most implausible position possible, one repudiated by his own magazine and one that even the mainstream media is slowly backing away from.

Mr. Tuttle appears to be unaware of the history of his own publication, National Review. He pretends that race does not exist, but National Review has a long history of recognizing the collective interests of whites. In a June 2, 1964 editorial on the 10th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, it noted that the Civil Rights Movement is more properly known as “the Negro revolt,” and that school integration by judicial fiat was “bad law and bad sociology.” The editorial concluded that “race relations in the country are ten times worse than in 1954.”

At one time, William F. Buckley recognized that demographics shape any political and cultural order. As he put it when defending segregation in “Why the South Must Prevail:”

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

As we look upon the ruin of once-great Southern cities such as Selma and Jackson after desegregation, and Northern cities such as Detroit and Chicago after restrictive covenants were banned, how can anyone disagree with Buckley?

Michael Barone admitted “racial differences” are real in National Review in a review of Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance.” And while National Review has a long history of running away from too frank of a discussion of racial realities, the writings of men such as John Derbyshire on the reality of race are still hosted by NRO.

Conservatives, we are told, have a commitment to “constitutional, and generally Judeo-Christian, values,” unlike the evil Alt Right. But what are “constitutional values?” Presumably Mr. Tuttle means some vague belief in the separation of powers or limited government.

But Barack Obama has already shown he can unilaterally impose sweeping changes in immigration law or gun control without raising anything but impotent whimpers from the ostensible opposition party. The fierce debate over who will fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia is an acknowledgement that the Supreme Court is already the most important body in the federal government–an innovation never foreseen by the Framers. Ted Cruz is running on a promise to “restore the Constitution,” but if the Constitution needs to be “restored,” it has already failed. That venerable piece of paper has been no barrier to expanding government power. As Joe Sobran, another great man fired by National Review, frequently observed, “The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.”

And what are “Judeo-Christian values?” The Founding Fathers would not have recognized such a term. Since Muslims will soon outnumber Jews in the United States, when will National Review or its “center right” successors start penning tributes to “Abrahamic values?”

Mr. Tuttle seems to argue that the “Western, liberal democratic order” is synonymous with Western Civilization itself. Of course, this is absurd; Western civilization began with the Greeks. But more important, even if it dated back only to 1776, it doesn’t follow that “the liberal democratic order” precludes recognition of the realities of race. That “order” has already been suspended throughout the West whenever it conflicts with the demands of multiculturalism.

Private property and freedom of association have been suspended by “civil rights” laws. Even as this is written, police are busting into apartments and homes in Europe, arresting people for the crime of peacefully dissenting from their government’s policy of replacing them with Muslims. In the “land of the free,” we now live under an increasingly oppressive security state designed to protect us from Muslims.

We would enjoy far more of the “freedom” conservatives talk about if we simply admitted that people are different and that Western societies have nothing to gain from importing vast numbers of Third Worlders who bring welfare dependence, terrorism, crime, and sweeping political and cultural change. The consequences of this unprecedented demographic transformation are indistinguishable, and perhaps even more severe, than the consequnces of military defeat and conquest–but National Review is worried that Vladimir Putin won’t do what we tell him to do.

Indeed, if the “Western, liberal democratic order” is to be preserved, only racial consciousness will preserve it. If there is one tenet held universally within the Alt Right, it is that changing demographics–specifically the transformation of America into a majority non-white country–will make mainstream conservatism irrelevant. The liberal media openly celebrate this transformation. As the demographic analysis of the electorate in any primary state shows, politics is about different groups with different preferences. Everyone practices identity politics when it counts. But when it comes to the utterly unprecedented replacement of the existing American population with leftist Third Worlders, the American conservative movement says not only we should not discuss the possible implications, but anyone who does is guilty of “moral rot,” and that simply by raising the question we become enemies of the “Western, liberal democratic order.”

Mass immigration is a mortal threat to the Western order that Mr. Tuttle says he loves. Why take the chance with what former National Review editor Peter Brimelow called the “unprecedented experiment being performed?” Mr. Tuttle huffs that it’s “simply nonsense to suggest that American conservatism was willfully complicit in the rise of the identity-politics Left.” But if that’s true, why is the Beltway Right so eager not just to accept the egalitarian premises of the Left, but to concede the Left’s authority to police the moral boundaries of the Right? Rich Lowry went so far as to thank the “anti-fascists” who told him to fire his employees. At some point, it’s hard to distinguish weakness from treason.

You can trace the rise or fall of authentic conservatism in the United States by the stature of the men who have been banned from National Review. We’ll be reading Peter Brimelow, Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, John Derbyshire, and Mark Steyn a half century from now. Who can say the same of Rich Lowry, Kathryn Jean Lopez, or Jay Nordlinger?

The Alt Right is rising because it actually has something to say about the issues of the day. The Beltway Right simply repeats slogans about “the Constitution” or “freedom,” and seems to believe that doing so will salvage something from the coming wreck of the West that their blindness to race is only hastening.

Identity is the issue of the 21st century, and whites, as whites, will either defend their right to exist or they will disappear. If we disappear, everything conservatives care about will disappear, too. An increasing number of conservatives are beginning to understand that. The Beltway Right has made a nice living accomplishing nothing for the last half century. We can’t afford to waste any more time. We have to do the hard political and intellectual work of building a real resistance to the status quo. If Mr. Tuttle did a little more reading and little more thinking he might have an honorable role to play in this great struggle.