North American New Right 1

by Greg Johnson

  Further, once the construction of the party became the key prerequisite for any meaningful politics, the participation of these would-be vanguard parties in the mass movement almost always took on a predatory and divisive character, as the activism of their militants was subordinated to each groupuscule’s sectarian maneuvering.

  By the 1980s many mass movement activists came to view the members of the various Left parties with deep suspicion. The most successful movements of that period—the Freeze, the Central America anti-intervention/solidarity movement, and the anti-nuclear power movement—were run by non-party activists who, while all committed radicals of one sort or another, functioned through informal leadership networks of like-minded people within their respective movements, while the parties of the Left often remained at the margins.

  At present, the anti-system Right is obviously qualitatively weaker than the Left was in the 1970s. Rather than wasting time and energy in grand organizational projects, the need now is simply to coalesce local groupings, to connect them together in informal networks, and to encourage a combined commitment to study, propaganda, and activism. Whatever structures created beyond this can only evolve organically out of the struggles themselves.

  Now, regarding your prediction of imminent collapse: I think that the analysis you present here of the system as synonymous with the Military-Industrial Complex is too narrow and owes too much to a paleoconservative perspective.

  I would argue instead that our current system can be more properly understood within the context of the global progression of the capitalist economy, which has transcended the limits of nation and human ownership—moving to a stage characterized by transnational corporations run by professional managers without roots in or commitment to any community or nation.

  While the transition from national elites to an international one is not complete, it is far advanced, with significant sectors of the elites and the professional-managerial classes having adopted a post-national, and even an anti-national, perspective.

  I don’t, of course, deny that there is a significantly megalomaniacal element to US foreign policy which has been particularly pronounced since World War II and which often leads to imperial over-reach, with the consequent national humiliation which almost inevitably results—however, I would argue that the imperial element in US politics is not essential to the system.

  In fact, the US government has shown itself often willing to cut its losses and disengage when the costs become too high. Following the disaster of Indochina, the US essentially abstained from significant ongoing military adventures for the next twenty-five years, and the interventions it did undertake—Grenada, Gulf War One, Serbia, Panama, etc.—were limited in time and/or troop involvement and were often successful. In the first Gulf War, the military and the administration even showed what in hindsight was the remarkable restraint and good sense not to pursue Saddam’s troops back into Iraq. In the case of Somalia, where things were clearly going the wrong way early on, Clinton just packed up and went home, subsequently blowing up the aspirin factory to leave them something to remember us by. Similarly Reagan, when the Marine barracks in Lebanon were truck-bombed at the cost of hundreds of American lives, brought the troops home and then had the USS New Jersey salve the wound by shelling Syrian and Shiite positions from a safe distance at sea.

  I have no doubt that as the world system expands—uprooting traditional ways of life around the globe, depleting resources, and destroying the environment, unleashing a massive population boom in the Third World, reducing the living standards of working people in the First World and creating an increasingly complex and fragile international financial system to sustain itself—it will continue to generate deep crisis and conflict. Overall, however, I think that the elites are far more flexible and much more likely to be able to survive those crises which do arise than your view allows. As I have argued before, only when a movement arises that takes advantage of the opportunities such crises offer will we be able to contemplate the end of the current globalist order.

  TWO

  “The combination of capital has created for [the workers] a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle

  . . . this mass becomes united, and constitutes

  itself as a class for itself.”

  —Karl Marx

  ARGUMENT OF JOHN SCHNEIDER

  As I mentioned in an earlier email, during the three or so decades from the middle 1950s to the 1980s, the system weathered a storm with many similarities to today’s—heightened racial conflict, failed presidencies (Johnson, Nixon, and Carter), military defeat and humiliation abroad, economic stagnation accompanied by unprecedented levels of inflation at home, the oil crisis, seemingly irresolvable conflict in the Middle East, the initiation of terrorist acts against the West, the widespread discrediting of the political class, and an intense culture war.

  At home social tensions reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. While the conflict and disruption caused by minorities and the Left are too well-known to repeat here, contrary to current nostalgic accounts, at the time there was real fear that these threatened the very foundations of order.

  Although in popular myth the political story of these decades centers on the challenges posed by the counter-culture and the civil rights/black power movement, in fact these years also saw the birth and growth of vital movements of the populist Right across the country. Generally, these movements are now treated as comic-book examples of reprehensible prejudice, serving merely to emphasize the continuing need for the affirmative action regime. At best, they are dismissed as examples of white “backlash.”

  The story of Dixie’s “massive resistance” to desegregation is well-known, but is of less relevance today than are the struggles which took place outside of the deep South. Beginning as early as the 1940s, urban white ethnic communities resisted the remaking of their neighborhoods, which was taking place through a combination of social engineering and black migration. Through the 1950s this resistance often took the form of youth and gang violence in neighborhoods and high schools, as well as in contested public spaces such as amusement parks and public beaches, leading to clashes such as the 1956 Crystal Beach riot near Buffalo, NY. (See Victoria W. Wolcott, “Recreation and Race in the Postwar City: Buffalo’s 1956 Crystal Beach Riot,” Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 1, June 2006.)

  By the 1960s and ’70s, in the face of mounting urban criminality, the massive destruction caused by the cycle of Northern race riots which began in 1964, and state efforts to force integration on unwilling white communities via fair housing laws, busing, and the construction of public housing in middle class and blue collar neighborhoods, whites began organizing large and sometimes successful grassroots resistance movements. These included organizations such as Anthony Imperiale’s North Ward Citizens’ Council, founded in the wake of the 1967 Newark riots, Boston’s ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), which waged a mass resistance campaign against forced busing in Boston in the 1970s, and, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the United School Parents, which was able to seize control of the West Contra Costa County Unified School District board from the liberal pro-busing majority in 1969.

  At the national level, the support among blue collar and middle class voters in the north and west for George Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 shocked political observers. In the 1968 election Wallace won almost ten million votes and carried five states, showing that a break with the two-party system was indeed possible.

  Meanwhile, a parallel grassroots movements around social and cultural issues began to grow, gathering strength in the ’70s, as insurgent groups organized in hundreds of communities around resistance to the introduction of books such as rapist Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice into high school libraries and syllabi. Across the country concerned parents battled multiculturalist educrats for control of their children’s education. At the same ti
me, resistance to the ERA and abortion mobilized tens of thousands more, causing liberals everywhere to fret over the supposed threat of theocracy.

  By the 1980s, however, the system had re-established its equilibrium. As far as the black community was concerned, its elites and middle class were bought off by having political control of many urban areas ceded to them and through the institution of affirmative action policies in business, the government bureaucracy, and educational institutions. Meanwhile, the black masses were pacified by a continued flow of welfare and other government subsidies, as well as trickle-down patronage from black-controlled state and local governments.

  Whites on the other hand continued to abandon urban areas with sizable black populations. The defeat of efforts to extend bussing and desegregation into the suburbs in the 1970s allowed the creation of “Whitopias” across the country. In 1990 the US was as residentially segregated as it had been before the civil rights movement began.

  The election of a fiscally conservative president in the person of Ronald Reagan helped keep taxes low enough and this—together with the liquidation of most American military adventures around the world, a stabilization in the international oil trade, an end to inflation, and the return of economic prosperity—made whites feel like everything was “just fine.” Affirmative action remained an irritant but really didn’t affect most people directly and, as for the cities, who really wanted to live in Detroit or Newark anyway? Further, with a good conservative like Reagan in the White House, the culture war seemed well on the way to being won by the good guys.

  Indeed, without the demographic transformation now underway, this resolution might arguably have been a reasonable and pragmatic way to neutralize the racial tensions which had been building for decades.

  The accommodation of the past twenty-five years, however, is clearly in the process of breaking down. For blacks and the now more numerous Latinos, playing the role of junior partners is becoming increasingly unacceptable. Further, their commitment to the affirmative action/welfare state’s entitlements is unwavering, regardless of the system’s inability to support an increasingly large population of “clients” on the same terms as when they were a small minority.

  For whites, the conjunctural economic recession, coupled with the country’s long-term economic decline, threatens the continually increasing standard of living, which allowed them to ignore their common concerns while pursuing individual prosperity. Further, with the shrinking white population, whites, as the most productive sector of the population, will be subject to an increasingly onerous tax burden, as the minority population which in 1970 was only about 15 percent of the population grows to 50 percent and beyond.

  Meanwhile, the affirmative action regime will need to become increasingly severe in order to maintain the officially-mandated diversity levels, leading to ever-harsher discrimination against qualified whites. Finally, last century’s strategy of white flight to the suburbs and beyond will almost certainly break down in the face of the simple numbers of non-whites, in addition to federal and state governments which may be as hostile to the currently-existing de facto segregation as they were to the de jure regime of fifty years ago.

  Overlaying this process will be the ever more aggressive implementation of the elites’ anti-Christian, anti-traditional social agenda. There is every reason to believe that once the Democrats achieve a safe majority—as they have done in California—there will be no limit to the state-sponsored assault on traditional values and their defenders.

  Up to now, Middle American whites held enough power by virtue of their numbers to ensure that the federal and most state governments would continue to put limits on the affirmative action regime and at least pay lip service to defending such traditional institutions as marriage and the family. It is clear, however, that, if it has not already vanished, this veto power is rapidly evaporating and in another decade or so will be gone entirely. By mid-century, we will simply be one more competing minority group.

  So the question to be faced by all of us—racially conscious conservatives, identitarian anti-system Rightists (like myself), and White Nationalists is: If we can’t just sit back and wait for the deux ex machina of the catastrophe to bring the system down, then what is to be done?

  The task, I think, is twofold. In the first place, grassroots populist resistance movements must be fostered everywhere. As the pressure on them mounts, whites will almost certainly respond as they did between 1955 and 1980, by turning to political activism.

  Indeed, the seemingly spontaneous growth of resistance activities around the country is already an encouraging development. The Tea Party movement, in spite of its largely brain-dead leadership, is a particularly exciting phenomenon. While its traditional American libertarian line is a real negative, the NAACP and the commentators of the Left are fundamentally correct about its racial character, since it represents the beginnings of an refusal on the part of whites to pay ever-higher taxes to support the ethnic spoils system and those social engineering projects which threaten to grow out of control once the Democrats really take permanent control of the federal government and the Supreme Court—as they already have done here in California—with predictable results.

  Events in Arizona and across the country around immigration control are similarly exciting, especially as the federal government steps in and attempts to reverse the democratic will of the people.

  It’s time, then, for the conscious anti-system elements to get up from behind their keyboards and learn to think and act politically—to descend into the streets, not simply to encourage the growth of these movements, but also to contribute to their political content and work to ensure that they are not once again absorbed and betrayed by the elite politicians of the GOP.

  The most valuable victory at this point will simply be the re-creation of American whites as a people for itself—as a people that militantly refuses to accept the denigration of themselves and their history, the destruction of their values and culture, the continuation of the anti-white discrimination that goes by the name of affirmative action, and the extortion of taxes to pay for the racial spoils system known as the American welfare state. The most likely way in which this will happen is precisely through the waging of the struggle itself.

  The more such a movement gains in strength, the more likely it is that the system’s contradictions will be intensified and the more likely it is that some political break will occur. The form of that break and what will emerge from it is impossible to say and pointless to predict—but, regardless, now is the time to take the first steps.

  Looking at the existing political resources can be discouraging, but I really believe, as I said to you today, that we’re in a position potentially similar to that of the Left in the late 1950s. What remains of the traditional hard Right movements is as generally useless (and even embarrassing) as were the remnants of the CP and SP in those days. Yet, beneath the surface, there was a ferment underway which was able to create a powerful New Left in less than a decade. I think that we, on the Right, have entered a similar age.

  RESPONSE OF MICHAEL O’MEARA

  John, this is unconcealing (as Heidegger would say) in its overview of the last few decades. Your emphasis on the changing nature of the affirmative-action regime, as it responds to demographic developments, is particularly good in demonstrating how the system is beginning to undermine itself.

  There are, however, several minor points I would contest, for they impinge on our larger differences about the present crisis.

  First off, I believe this crisis is qualitatively different from that of the 1970s—that it is, indeed, a terminal crisis. It’s true, as you claim, that in this earlier period there was also a sense of general decline—“Carter’s malaise”—and that racial/cultural tensions were becoming threatening.

  The problems of the ’70s may have resurfaced, but because the general context is so much different from that decade, it makes these problems qualitatively more serious—and potent
ially system destroying.

  Internationally, the ’70s were a decade of humiliating defeat (Vietnam), lost prestige, and retreat—as the Soviet Union (which would collapse in the next decade) seemed to be overtaking the US almost everywhere. The economy was in a slump and the culture wars of the ’60s still simmered. There’s no question that this was experienced as a bleak period for the US. But no major restructuration of the global order occurred (though movement was mounting in the Global South to challenge US hegemony). The Cold War status quo nevertheless prevailed, even if the US was forced to retreat here and there.

  What has changed since then is the collapse of the Soviet Union, the advent of unipolarity (which the neocons used to justify their militarily aggressive empire building in the Middle East), mass Third World colonization of the First World, and the devastating economics of globalization. These changes—whose implications have been world-shattering—are creating a situation which, I believe, will lead to breaks in the system, through whose cracks a new global nomos will emerge in which US hegemony becomes a thing of the past.

  This will affect the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency and, domestically, add thick new layers of economic complication to the system’s ability to meet its various domestic obligations and pursue its imperial crusades abroad. At some not-too-distant point these strains are likely to become unbearable, causing the system (which is already worn out, dysfunctional, and beset by boondoggles of ever more colossal proportions) to implode.

  My view of Ronald Reagan also differs from yours. Yes, he paraded as a fiscal conservative and a defender of traditional values. But, in my mind, this was part of his administration’s neoliberal window-dressing. Up to Reagan, Roosevelt’s old Social Democratic system, with its labor-management partnership, still prevailed. In cahoots with the insufferable Iron Maiden, Reagan helped dismantle this regime, which had begun to economically stagnate in the ’70s, and introduced the neoliberal principles (“supply-side economics”) that would deregulate everything and enthrone financial capital: with its globalist ambitions, its maniacal privatizations, its multifront offensive on popular living standards—and the floodgates it opened to Third World immigration.