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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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how do the differences between the progressive left and the white-identity right actually cash out in action and policy?

Broadly speaking, they differ in their policy positions on and attitudes towards:

  • Abortion

  • Gun ownership

  • Social status of women in general (white identity right would prefer to see them railroaded much more strongly into traditional homemaker roles)

  • Homosexuality

  • Pornography and all other types of social "degeneracy"

  • Transsexuality and access to trans medical care

  • Even their views on race are not simple mirror images of each other - progressives believe in the possibility of a multiracial society and consequently support much higher rates of immigration, white identity right believes in monoethnic enclaves with restricted immigration.

White identitarians are, on average, extremely socially conservative, and they consequently take socially conservative views on these issues.

Economically it's a mixed bag, certainly you have some self-styled "national socialists" on the far right who support expansive government intervention in the free market and a strong social safety net, but you also see plenty of free market libertarianism, of the variety that no progressive would support.

It's harder to try and think of things that the two camps actually agree on.

You might say that all the non-racial issues don't actually matter, and that the two groups are actually defined by their views on race so that's the only thing we should be looking at, but that just reduces your claim to a tautology. Obviously if you consider X-believers and not-X-believers in the abstract and refuse to entertain any other property, then the only thing we'll be able to say about them is that one believes in X and one believes in not-X. So in order for the claim to have substance we have to look at progressivism and white identitarianism as concrete social phenomena, along with all their attendant "contingent" properties.

  • Abortion

It is routine for me to see HBD proponents decry the reversal of Roe v Wade explicitly on the grounds that black women will no longer be aborting their babies at their previous disproportionately-high rates. Has your experience been different?

  • Gun ownership

Plausible, but I'd appreciate some examples. I do not see any HBD supporters or white-identitarians in leading the charge in the gun culture, and given how many of them vote Democrat and have all their lives, I'm skeptical they're staunch 2A advocates. Do you have specific people in mind here?

  • Social status of women in general (white identity right would prefer to see them railroaded much more strongly into traditional homemaker roles)

Again, do you have specific examples here? Is Jared Taylor outspoken on womens' role being in the home? For that matter, I'm curious how you understand Red Tribe's attitude toward social status of women, given that committed Christians holding conservative views such issues are disproportionately female. Like, there are a lot of women in my Church, and I'm pretty sure most of them wouldn't agree with your framing. Certainly my wife would not, or her sister, or her mother, or my mother or sister.

  • Homosexuality

Did we ever figure out whether BAP was actually gay or not?

  • Pornography and all other types of social "degeneracy"

BAP again, and in general this is not the vibe I get from my interactions and observations. God Shaped Hole would be the strongest support for this argument that I'm aware of. I didn't finish the piece, but while it struck me as porn-critical, its objection seemed much more political and centered on porn-as-it-currently-functions, not porn-in-general. Perhaps I'm wrong, or you have other examples in mind?

  • Transsexuality and access to trans medical care

I expect the people most concerned with Trans issues to be the sincerely religious, and those most concerned with white identitarianism to be atheist and to view Trans issues as a distraction from what really matters, which is race. Certainly that's the pattern I believe I've observed here. I'm open to being corrected, though.

  • Even their views on race are not simple mirror images of each other - progressives believe in the possibility of a multiracial society and consequently support much higher rates of immigration, white identity right believes in monoethnic enclaves with restricted immigration.

I don't think either one has much chance of securing the future they purport to desire, so I'm not sure why this should be more relevant than the similarities in the ways they engage with race here and now.

I expect the people most concerned with Trans issues to be the sincerely religious

Trans issues are important to many on the social right - religious or not, white identitarian or not.

There's concern for the healthy people who are performing irreversible unnecessary medical procedures on their bodies due to what is essentially a social contagion, many of whom are impressionable young teens, and there's also the natural bristling at the Orwellian "you must say that this man is actually a woman and let him participate in women's sports" dictates. Neither of these justifications are religious in nature.

From the National Justice Party platform statement (the NJP is a recently-defunct white identitarian party spearheaded by Mike Enoch of therightstuff.biz. Although the party recently disbanded due to internal conflicts, their website nationaljusticeparty.com is still available on the wayback machine):

"We will restore reason, logic and tradition to the education system by implementing a comprehensive classical curriculum. Homosexual, neoliberal, and transgender propaganda will be explicitly banned from being taught to children."

From Patriotic Alternative (largest active white identitarian party in the UK):

From Counter Currents:

Again, do you have specific examples here? [regarding women's issues]

It's primarily a general attitude that I've picked up on from comments sections and podcasts. I don't have a ton of specific examples offhand to link to. But we do have:

From Patriotic Alternative:

"Unfortunately, feminism like other ‘isms’ is all too often used by our enemies as a means to diminish the significance of the family and distract women of all classes, skill-sets and educational backgrounds from forming meaningful and mutually supportive relationships with male partners."

From the NJP platform statement:

"We support strong families. Married women will be paid by the state to care for their children. No fault divorce will be repealed, and homosexual marriage will be banned."

Surely these statements would set off alarm bells for progressives.

For that matter, I'm curious how you understand Red Tribe's attitude toward social status of women, given that committed Christians holding conservative views such issues are disproportionately female. Like, there are a lot of women in my Church, and I'm pretty sure most of them wouldn't agree with your framing. Certainly my wife would not, or her sister, or her mother, or my mother or sister.

Your original post was about the "progressive left" and the "white-identity right", so those are the groups I'm comparing.

It's important that we not conflate "white-identity right", "HBD supporters", and "red tribe". These are all separate things, even though there is overlap.

If your wife, sister, and mother are not white identitarians, then I don't think their views are relevant for this comparison.

Did we ever figure out whether BAP was actually gay or not?

Is BAP actually a white identitarian? As in does he advocate for a race-based criteria for citizenship and immigration? I'm not familiar with his work.

Regardless, see the NJP platform statement above about banning homosexual propaganda.

Pornography

From Counter Currents:

From The Occidental Observer:

It is routine for me to see HBD proponents decry the reversal of Roe v Wade explicitly on the grounds that black women will no longer be aborting their babies at their previous disproportionately-high rates. Has your experience been different?

There's a pretty wide variety of perspectives on abortion within white identitarianism, but in general most people will be opposed to white women aborting healthy white babies, which is already a marked difference from the standard progressive platform of (relatively) unrestricted access to abortion for all women.

Greg Johnson's take.

Plausible, but I'd appreciate some examples. [on gun control]

It's not a flagship issue for white identitarians but see here.

I don't think either one has much chance of securing the future they purport to desire, so I'm not sure why this should be more relevant than the similarities in the ways they engage with race here and now.

You asked how the progressive left and the white-identity right are different. I pointed out a policy question that they differ on. How is that not relevant?

The progressive left hates white identitarians, deeply, and has done a lot of concrete harm to individual white identitarians by doxing and canceling people. We can explain this hatred by pointing to the numerous deeply-held ideological differences between them. And yet somehow, despite all that, both groups are still really the same because... the white-identity right isn't powerful enough to actually implement the policies they want? That's bordering on a non-sequitur.

Did we ever figure out whether BAP was actually gay or not?

...

BAP again, and in general this is not the vibe I get from my interactions and observations.

It's funny, I was about to go on a whole rant that would have probably gotten me banned and you probably saved my ass.