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The one thing he keeps bringing up that I think actually lands, and it's not surprising he started with it because of that, is the unilateral disarmament that is whites not having an affinity group despite every other racial group having one. I don't really know how that point could realistically be discharged though - It's too easy to compare to naziism. Considering the makeup of likely people who would first advocate for and join such a party the comparison would probably not even be unfair.
edit: I should say my preference would be to abolish all the affinity groups, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
This is just misunderstanding how and why these advocacy groups work. WN talk as if minorities are "stronger" than whites collectively due to this advocacy, and that current racial politics are caused by their "winning". This is not how things work outside Zimbabwe et al. Its pretty clear Blacks cant actually threaten the US government if you think about it for a bit. These organisations exist because liberalism thinks they should, and they are given concessions because it thinks they should """win""". A white organisation mirroring them is pointless, because its not the internal structure that makes them work. If you could convice mainstream whites that it would be ok to have one, you have already convinced them on the way there to stop this theater, and then it wouldnt be necessary anymore to have one.
I totally disagree. Affinity groups around tribes or causes is how electoral politics work. Labor organizes around unions, Christians organize around various advocacy organizations, AIPAC, various trade groups, environmental organizations, you name it, all of them are to one degree or another affinity groups. What doesn’t work is individual political actors or very small groups, because without a large bloc, and especially a large bloc with big bags of cash, it’s not really possible to get modern politicians to bother.
I find the opposition to such an idea to be one of the best propaganda wins in recent history. You almost can’t actually have the conversation with people who don’t already agree to the proposition. Everyone else stops up their ears at the mere mention of the idea of a white advocacy group. I’m not proposing that they push segregation or anything of the sort, I’m not looking to disenfranchise people. But even the suggestion that there be a white group with a seat at the table when the ideas of DEI and affirmative action and even other policies around affordability are discussed. It’s like a cognitive kill switch to bring up the idea that they are allowed to have ancestral pride, advocate for their interests, and promote their culture just like everyone else. They might on the margins be okay with Irish groups marching on St. Patty’s, or Germans forming cultural heritage groups to drink beer and eat sausages.
@hydroacetylene because I think your objection is similar.
Why do you think white people vote for the left? On the "tribal power" model, it would have to be something like "Theyre being freeriders in the common white cause, and prioritising their other interests". Does that seem true? It looks to me that they dont just accept minority demands, they way you would give your allies their due. No, they generally consider it a positive to support these demands even at their own expense - not necessarily if that expense gets very large, but still. Dem primary candidates outwoking each other is for whites, the black machine voters gave us Biden.
Politics is never just interest blocks smashing against each other, not until you collapse all the way, at which point its war and diplomacy, rather than politics. Without a shared Nomos there is no polity, but only something like Realist international relations, which US domestic politics is visibly not.
I agree, and it can be valuable to talk about this - what I disagree with is your model of what happens when that changes. You seem to think that theres some stage where theres a politically viable white movement that competes with the other ethnic movements, and sometimes one wins and sometimes the other, and I think you actually win before it gets there. "Stop listening to the black movement" is an easier ask than "start listening to the white movement".
There is no such thing as ‘white people’ as a monophyletic group. In the US there’s a blue tribe, which voted for the left, and there’s several groups which vote for the right and are called ‘red tribe’ by the motte despite being different groups. The red and blue tribes hate each other more than either of them hate or are hated by minorities, Serb and Bosnian style. Our politics is just Balkans tribalism, like he says, but almost everyone is wrong about what the tribes are.
This would make sense if the "anti-white" policies of the left were actually only anti-red-tribe, and didnt harm blue tribers.
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They’re on the left because they value other coalitions they are in. I’m not suggesting that a person can only be in one group, I can be in the NRA and the Labor bloc at the same time. I don’t think you aren’t doing coalition based politics just because a person might be part of several. It’s just that for a bock to win on an issue you have to get enough potential members of that bloc to make that their top issue.
If you are in the NRA and the Labor block and you vote Dem, I would expect that you at least dislike the Dem policies on guns. But white liberals dont dislike Dem policies on race. Why not?
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If your point is just that the groups themselves are epiphenominal to the desire to help minorities and it's instead sympathy for minorities that causes open advocacy for racial discrimination in favor of them that also creates the groups that are purely symbolic then sure. I guess what I object to is whatever egregore allows open unidirectional advocacy against my and my family's interests on the basis of or skin color.
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No, organized black advocacy is definitely a big part of liberalism's political strength. The black political machine is just a huge part of democrat's competitiveness in swing states and it's no accident that the african american wing of the party tends to get its way.
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Right, one of Taylor’s main goals in creating American Renaissance was to try and be the focal point of a movement of racially-conscious whites with impeccable optics: erudite, genteel, conservative-coded. No Roman salutes, no street brawls, no white-trash dysfunction, no scary pagan LARPing, etc. Early American Renaissance conferences featured several Jewish speakers, and Taylor has never made the Jewish Question a topic of his advocacy. However, American Renaissance and its surrounding movement had a separate problem, which is that — due mainly to the proud Southern heritage and pro-Confederate sympathies of Taylor and its other early figures like Sam Dickson and Sam Francis — it struck many as having a distinct odor of that other epochal white identitarian movement, the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, to be clear, Taylor himself is squeaky-clean: Yale-educated, a successful businessman, multilingual, an unimpeachable family life, and not a whiff of violence or disreputable behavior. The immediate circle he cultivated was respectable, denouncing anything resembling racial terrorism. He believed he could create a genuine intellectual movement, like the early Progressives, winning people over to his cause through reasoned argumentation and leading by example. This didn’t save him from being labeled a white supremacist, a hate-monger, and all other manner of opprobrious terms by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The most genteel figure imaginable was still basically a Klansman and an evil cult leader in the eyes of those people.
Nowadays, many of the leading lights on the so-called Dissident Right — which is largely an outgrowth of the intellectual current Jared Taylor helped create and nurture — do indeed have more of the disreputable and optically-unfortunate tendencies which more strongly trigger respectable people’s Nazi Alarms. It’s unfortunate that honorable men such as Taylor couldn’t do more to mainstream their cause back when it still could have avoided these failure modes. It’s encouraging, though, to see that many of their most dire predictions appear not to have come true to the extent they feared.
My initial reaction to this quokka-esque faith in reasoned discourse was “lol, lmao even”
But then I realized that Taylor is the product of a different time, a time when public intellectuals really did have some cachet and, even if they weren’t household names per se, they still had some power to set the conversation and shift people’s opinions through logos. The Mont Pellerin Society, for example, was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Reagan/Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s.
I wonder if Taylor will embrace the new meta, or if he will cling to the antiquated ideals of the Ivy League debating society to the bitter end.
Jared Taylor is 73; a man that old does not change his mind.
It is death that causes the lack of change. Will X lead to consequence Y or Z? Elon predicts Y. The years tick by. In twenty years time X will have caused either Y or Z. It is becoming easier to predict with each passing year. Eventually every-one will agree how it turned out.
When will Elon change his mind? If he is old enough to die before the twenty years are up, he won't bother. He isn't going to live to see it and will not be personally embarrassed.
If instead he gets wonder rejuvenation treatment, and fifty years more life, the future becomes more real. He starts to care about where trends are leading because he anticipates seeing the eventual outcome. If Y is starting to look like a bad bet, Elon will change his mind.
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