The Alt-Right’s Ladder of Victimhood
When conceptualizing the Alt-Right, you’d probably think of them as standing in total opposition to the radical left, their ideological foils. With figures like Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, and occasional fellow-traveler Milo Yiannopoulos, their ideas are seemingly directly opposed. But there is one thread that binds them at the hip: a deep and unabiding devotion to group identity. They enjoy a sort of symbiotic relationship — one not only feeding, but thriving off the other, parasitizing the body politic of the United States.
While those who belong to these twin movements operate under the belief that they’re mortal foes, they leave unnoticed that they’re fundamentally animated by one thing: a shared resentment, and outsourced blame to better-performing groups. Black Lives Matter lays all inequity in their own lives at the feet of a so-called white establishment, feminists at the so-called patriarchy, and the Alt-Right — almost entirely at a so-called Jewish establishment hellbent on the erasure of their identity. The Alt-Right has grievances with other ethnic groups to be sure, but they view them as merely the useful idiots for the larger machinations of the conniving Jewish class, maneuvering to smite the white man for some indeterminately Jewish reason. But that sort of philosophizing is reserved for the movement’s thought leaders. The rest of them are merely angsty young men, longing to belong to a group that can imbue them with the meaning they’ve been unable to find in a society that is solely focused on reminding them of just how privileged they are.
Typically these dichotomies are depicted as “two sides of the same coin”, but a more accurate visual cue would be that of different rungs on the same ladder. Not only do they thrive off of one another’s existence — each confirming the other’s warped worldview of oppressive power games — but they couldn’t exist independently. This relationship is both symbiotic and parasitic in a country predicated on the elevation of the individual.
The Alt-Right isn’t easy to get a grasp on, mostly because it isn’t a movement with a clearly defined mission or credo. It straddles a murky territory that is bounded in reaction to the antics of the radical left. It’s popularizers are the well-spoken and presentable likes of Jared Taylor, and it’s most prominent spokesman is Richard Spencer. The Alt-Right differentiates itself by not conforming to the long-established portrait of what a white nationalist looks like.
These characters have gained a lot of traction online simply because some of the most prominent thinkers today don’t think it’s worthwhile to challenge their ideas with any seriousness. This fails to take into account that ignoring them only allows them to fester and grow. As the radical left rapidly exposes itself to be the defunct ideology it is, alternative collectivist strains of thoughts emerge in reaction, with their own toxically dogmatic prescriptions. They aren’t a joke, and it’s a perennial feature of history for groups to cast blame on those who flourish in their civilization.
There is always the amusing-but-shallow tendency to look at tiki-torch-touting-polo boys and think they’ve set down the path of ideology merely because they can’t get laid. And to think that is the sole explanation is shallow — but the rapidly deteriorating social bonds between the sexes is surely a prime breeding ground for this sort of resentment and vindictive rage. There is a reason meme-magic has been an exceptionally potent marketing tool to reel in predominantly twenty-something, nihilistic men. Many of those who engage in their antics are oblivious to its racial and tyrannical elements, thinking it’s just about frog memes and trolling the left. This perception is made all the more effective by the use of “weaponized autism” which reached the height of its success by convincing the most paranoid elements of leftist society that the “ok” hand gesture really means “white power.”
For these young men, the realization that the vast majority of women are jockeying for a very small proportion of men — the top 20% — no doubt drives many to turn toward the in-group to secure their place in the dominance hierarchy. An inability to find pride in your own accomplishments, ability, or looks will almost certainly make filling that hole with the “collective achievements” of your gender or race an infinitely better alternative than taking stock of yourself and repairing what you see and don’t like. They think their memberships within the collective will compensate for their individual insufficiency.
Obviously, this experience isn’t limited to the Alt-Right. By now, nobody is oblivious to the feminist, sneaker-fucker men in our midst, championing gender-equality in the hope of their flagrant virtue drawing unshaven feminists into their orbit — not a successful strategy, but it at least puts them in the same crowd. Of course, this is not the only appeal of collectivism, but the biological drive for reproduction especially among young, sexually deprived men is not something to be written off.
All that being said, the most vocal thread across the Alt Right is their inability to comment on any YouTube video without sputtering that the problem the video addresses must actually be the rotten fruit of (((them))) — the Jews. Any unwillingness to talk about (((them))) is mocked as “cuckery” — the assumption that you’re really on board with their paranoiac fanaticism, but you don’t have the gaul to be as courageous as those with Knights templar avatars typing away at 200 WPM. In their view, the truth couldn’t be any more obvious, and there is no good-faith reason you’d disagree.
They think they’ve connected all kinds of dots — that Hollywood is principally Jewish, that Jews occupy a vastly disproportionate share of powerful positions ranging from media, government, and especially, finance. The picture of Shakespeare’s Venetian Merchant is taking up shop in their minds, and business is booming. What is that business? Erasing white people from the ledger of human history.
These ideas gain so much traction for a variety of reasons. Like every ideology, there is always a whiff of truth to mask the scent of fecal matter that stains the underlying foundation. Nobody paying attention to the antics of many on the radical left today can deny that there’s an undercurrent of anti-whiteness. They actively deplore the foundation of the United States, and the entire West to boot, on the basis that it is built on the subjugation of one minority after another. A disportionate share of radical leftists happen to be ethnically Jewish. Ergo, the Alt-Right reasons that the Jews are conspiring to displace whites.
This line of reasoning and resentment is held by people who follow what may seem to be vastly different ideologies and backgrounds. But in-group preference is a human universal, and the Alt-Right panders to that expertly. One not so obvious parallel would be the widespread hatred of “gentrification”, by which wealthy white people move into a desirable piece of real-estate and open up pricey living quarters and establishments and only employ those like them. This, obviously, lowers crime and increases the general standard of living, but those who can no longer afford to live in the now-lavish community are pushed out, leaving them to blame those who move in there and clean the place up for their misfortune.
Nobody likes to see those from outside their community do better within it. When that happens, there is a substantial number of people who are going to assume they’ve only done so because of some sort of underhanded ploy by the group in question. So even while we know that Jews have an IQ two standard deviations above the norm, the Alt-Right believes that the only way they could have accomplished the many feats they have is by exploitation and manipulation.
This is a consequence of a broad tendency for people to look at any disproportionality and assume that it was only obtained by cheating. It’s judged “unfair”, in one way or another. And it is the exact same crutch that the radical leftists the alt-right claims to stand in stark contrast to lean on. Take the wage-gap, which has long been shown to be the result of different lifestyle choices men and women make, and not the discriminatory malevolence of white men. Or the idea that those in black communities are being unfairly targeted by police, and that it has nothing to do with the fact that 13% of the population is perpetrating 50% of the crime.
And that’s the rich irony of this supposed battle of ideas: they’re the same ones, packaged differently. Both of these groups care little for conserving the enlightenment values of subordinating the state — or the collective — to that of the individual. The Alt-Right simply trades the social and moral relativism of the radical left for authoritarianism, but it embraces its anti-capitalism, state-centered, identity-driven politics. The Alt-Right reasons that the tyranny of certainty is better than chaotic moral relativism of the radical left. Better the certainty of Alt Right tyranny than the chaos of Leftist moral relativism.
The murderousness of the 20th century should have demonstrated finally what happens when you reduce the members of a group to mere cogs in the collective machine. In the crowd’s frenzied pursuit of a supposedly good end, the individuals comprising the whole inevitably get trampled by the means.
