A Coming of Age; A Shedding of Skin

Out with the New Right, In with the New Right

The Dissident Right, or perhaps it and its direct predecessors, has been present the entirety of my adult life thus far. I can unequivocally state that it has been the highest influence upon my actions until this point, and quite frankly I thank it for such as I do not see how I could have existed in any other way. But to love something is to let it go, and I believe I must say as much here.

The punchline dear reader, so you don’t have to read a whole article, is that the Dissident Right is dead and this is the best thing that could have happened to it. I’m very excited to see what will come out of it, and believe the next movement will have more cultural force than ever expected. One could argue the Ship of Theseus point on this: when does the old ship become the new ship; when do enough old personalities give way to new personalities?

In order to answer this question and justify what I’m saying, let’s give ourselves a definition of what the Dissident Right is/was:

The Dissident Right is/was the collection of viewpoints, personalities, anons, and movements that existed after the fall of the Alt Right in Charlottesville. This is everyone right of MAGA Boomers. Prior to 2017, these spheres (manufactured label it may be) were known as the Alt Right and were primarily centered around one (now much disgraced) Richard Spencer. The winds were different back then, and hindsight is always 20/20.

I hate to break it to the dear reader, but the DR isn’t/wasn’t half the movement the Alt Right was. Think of it in terms of regime containment. The Alt Right required a federally instigated op guaranteed to produce a dead body to contain. All it takes to contain the DR is have some TradCath get into a fight with some OrthoBro, or have Moldbug call us Hobbits.

In no uncertain terms, the DR is a glorified media consumption group.

The Alt Right was pushing policy, getting national airtime, humiliating the left all across the country, and pushing tangible policy goals that your average white bread eating normie could envision themselves supporting. The DR is, well, what is the DR doing? Making threads on how Ancient Greek rituals killing babies need to be brought back? How drinking Bull Semen will make you literally Achilles? How St. Thomas Aquinas said that we can’t enjoy cigars and steaks or how fucking every woman that walks will make you happy?

No, I don’t believe any containment of our ilk is required, seeing how we do it so well already. I don’t mean to call out friends for any of this, and should any interpret it as such then I apologize for the miscommunication. But this cannot go on. 

Less than half a decade of this has brought us down to near cultural irrelevancy. The Alt Right’s goals have been off-shored to “Based” DeSantis moderates and “Dark MAGA” Schizophrenia, and even normiecons have coopted the talking points that people would like to hear while keeping their agenda the same as it has been since 2000. I admit, the Alt Right’s success was largely due to capitalizing on the momentum of Trump’s 2016 run; the DR have no such trade winds. But a skilled farmer can make a garden out of a desert, and an unskilled farmer can make a desert out of a garden. I tell you reader, we are no skilled farmers.

The Alt Right made many, many mistakes. Hence why they are dead. Yet their mistakes were better than our successes. Did they not recognize how deeply the state stood against them? Perhaps. But they were doing things and doing them regularly. In other words, they acted normal. Sure, 20/20 hindsight tells us that maybe having a rally with a bunch of hillbillies and bikers that got drunk the night before may not be the best idea. But compare it to now.

The DR is almost entirely holed up in their internet bunkers, like Cicadas for their fourteen off-years. They rip and tear at each others’ circlejerk; the TradCaths are off doing one thing, the OrthoBros are off doing another, the Anglos and Neo-Nazis and BAPists and Neopagans are all doing God knows what. Everyone is obsessed with “Identity,” whatever the fuck that means.

“What are we? What should we be?” If these questions have to be asked in the first place then consider your movement a veritable failure. The “Dissident” Right as it stands right now can only be defined by what it’s in opposition to: that being the “Regime. This is (probably not ironically,) reactionary in the worst sense of the term. The Alt Right suffered from it too, but entropy had yet touched them and they died in a flash. The DR is a dry blades of grass in the wind, a caravan of ghosts.

As things stand, as things have always stood, Dissidents and Conservatives share the same fate. Both positions are inherently losing positions, like a boulder dropped into a river which gets worn away a little bit more each day by the flow of the waters. They’re both the losing spot, defining themselves against something bigger which already exists instead of defining themselves as themselves.

To flow with the stream is to win. To cut a ditch where water can split is to win. To stand against the stream is to be drowned, or worn away. The Dissident Right, so long as it keeps defining itself and even worse, thinking itself to be an other as compared to the Regime, will be drowned or worn away.

All of you, especially you twenty-somethings, must re-integrate yourself into civil society. This means going to Church, volunteering at soup kitchens, running for School-Boards and PTAs, Rotary Clubs, Lion’s Clubs, Elks Lodges, Ruritans, the Masons if you can stomach them, the Knights if you’re of that persuasion. In essence, Ideology is a dead-end. It’s good to have an idea of what your ends are and the ends of your friends are, sure. But too much of it and you’re trapped in endless debate instead of making minor steps towards “Good enough” ends.

If you think the insanity you see and stand against in your carefully cultivated internet spheres is how everyday life works, I’m afraid you’re beyond saving.

But the DR was a good thing. It had its purpose. We met each other, made networks of friends, most of us linked up irl. We’ve gained an understanding for how things work, for theories and narratives of meaning, for paths we can walk to bring about the world as it should be. And if you think a movement is not a thing in itself, that it’s only the people within it; the Dissident Right (except for the name, as dissidents love hanging around Jews and nominating Jews as their leaders) is not dead.

The next steps just take actual work. And a shedding of skin.