A Reality Check For the Right

Caption the above photo."Misanthropy develops when without art one puts complete trust in somebody thinking the man absolutely true and sound and reliable and then a little later discovers him to be bad and unreliable...and when it happens to someone often...he ends up...hating everyone." - Socrates, as depicted in Plato’s Phaedo“All addiction is bad, whether to alcohol, morphine or idealism.” - Carl JungRecently, while watching Bill Maher’s HBO talk show, He noted with glee that Governor Jan Brewer, governor of my home state of Arizona, recently vetoed a bill that would allow people to refuse service to homosexuals on the basis of the freedom of personal association. Naturally, conservatives angrily railed at her. They called her a sellout, a phony, a hypocrite. The thing Bill Maher and all the conservatives did not take into account was that next year’s Super Bowl is due to take place in Arizona, and the NFL said it would pull out if she signed the bill into law.Brewer is a true-blue conservative. Arizona is a state which is one of only four where a man can buy a gun with no waiting period, immediately put it under his coat with no concealed carry license, and walk outside onto the street legally. She also gave us the more important immigration status check bill which allows police officers to ask suspects their immigration status and prove it. She has pursued a rollback of abortion in the state. She cut taxes. As for the population, the Republican Party there is among one of the most conservative in the country. Arizona takes the lead when it comes to nationalist and conservative issues. Brewer is one of the “least worst” of the Republican cadre for taking the right stand when it comes to gun rights issues and immigration, and is not afraid to say so—even if she does it in “political speech” rather than make a cultural argument like national conservatives would. Regardless, she takes a stand for the right things.So, did Brewer sell out? In a sense, yes, and in a sense, no. She made the right decision. Many hard-line conservatives would think not, and in any other situation, signing the bill into law would make sense. But if Brewer lost the economic boom of the Super Bowl over the bill, it would make her respected by only a minority of ultra-right-wingers, people she doesn’t need to further convince to keep her governorship well respected. It’s the moderates and independents she must convince. If she made herself look like such a fanatic that she could sacrifice the Super Bowl for a bill that has a great chance of being fought by the Supreme Court only to prove she was a conservative, she would be incredibly stupid. The NFL put her in a corner and she had to gnaw off a finger to escape the trap. She made a good move, and it's better we keep her around than lose her due to an unrealistic adherence to principle at all costs. Had Murdock in Indiana and Akin in Missouri made the right calls instead of trying to impress conservatives, their Senate seats would right not be occupied by Democrats.This little maneuver on the part of Brewer, in concert with seeing people online—particularly nationalists—griping about the imperfections of Vladimir Putin, spurred me to write a reality check for paleoconservatives and nationalists on the nature of politics and why we need politicians who make compromises. We need leaders who are smart enough to stick to what is truly important, but know when to back down from a fight instead of falling on their sword.All too often, I see people throw away a politician because of a tactical move they made instead of understanding the big picture of what they are trying to accomplish. Over the past few years, my libertarian friends became very unenthused by Rand Paul’s behavior, such as endorsing Mitt Romney, supporting parts of the Patriot Act like being able to actually treat terrorists like terrorists, and not going all-out for legalizing hard drugs. White nationalists, who were somewhat excited about Rand Paul for a bit before they saw him not be a complete idiot about race relations, lost all faith in him after he basically disowned Jack Hunter (who was painted as a racist, albeit unfairly, and therefore politically toxic to Paul) and wrote in support of Martin Luther King, saying dumb things about the Republican Party being a beacon of “anti-racist conservatism” and that liberals were the real racists. Of course, that’s absolute crap he said just to ditch the fallout of his associations with known race-conscious conservatives. However, libertarians and white nationalists essentially vilified him for what amounts to good political moves without looking at the bigger picture: that even with all his flaws, Rand Paul would be our best president in decades—maybe even in a century—if he were to be elected. Rand Paul is not only popular and highly electable, but even if he explicitly does not care to advance white interests in the form of an ethno-state, his positions on war, taxes, NSA spying, drones, welfare, abortion, gun rights, affirmative action, and many other things are in our interest, and so far in office he has made good on his promises. He also was one of the few opponents of the immigration bill and highlighted the blatant electoral grab that the Democrats were trying for and called for strict voting regulations for new immigrants. Paul is also one of the few politicians in the Senate with a chance of winning the presidency who could make life better for conservative whites. He doesn’t need to impress the extreme right because he doesn’t need our votes. He needs middle-American moderate votes.One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that a politician is a liar-manipulator-Machiavellian-evil-not-to-be-trusted-scumbag for making explicitly tactical moves. Most of the time politicians do this. When they do not, we fawn over them, believing that he is “one of the few” who is morally superior—“the chosen one”. Sometimes, these “chosen ones” take the guise of a man like Ron Paul, or in a less popular twist: Hitler. A politician like either of the Pauls is good for our society, but when we pedestalize anyone we set ourselves up for failure because human beings are not and cannot be perfect. Even if they are, we wouldn’t know because it would probably contrast with our starry-eyed idealism about the way things “ought to be”. People want their leaders to be pure. But what is best? A pure leader who gets nothing accomplished, or an imperfect, but accomplishing figure? If you adhere to your beliefs 100%, you may find yourself in a garage somewhere, angrily yelling at a television because the man who beat you is on it and is now enacting his agenda instead of yours. To win, you need to know the rules of the game.Those that think there are absolutely no good politicians are just as delusional as those who think that politicians can be sliced up into neatly defined ideological sections. Most of the politicians we see on TV are untrustworthy and acting out of self interest—but that’s not why you vote for or against them. You vote based on one thing—what they accomplish. Whatever they say is meaningless. What they stand for is reflected in their votes and policies. The average person dismisses all politicians so they can absolve themselves of supporting the mess of democracy or popular government. Like many of us frustrated conservatives, they want to just give up at times and will only support a candidate who fits their rigid ideological view. But by doing that, you are allowing the enemy more tactical space to work against you. There have always been a large amount of opportunists in the political sphere, but the key is to pick the opportunist that benefits you.This relates to the “lesser of two evils” argument that we are bombarded with, but there is truth to it. You should at least take the 30 minutes or less out of your day to vote for the lesser of two evils, because the minor amount of effort exerted can have a maximal amount of benefit. If you care about any issue at all, politics is something you should pay attention to. Taxes, guns, civil rights, diversity, NSA spying, and the candidates who support or are against any of these things stand to effect you. All too often, I see political idealists just throw up their hands and quit, or not even bother to get educated about political issues because politicians don’t fit some idealized version of a platform they want. I felt this way until I made myself listen to Ron Paul speak in 2011, and started educating myself because for once, a man on Fox News was saying things I largely agreed with. Government will never be perfect and politics will never be perfect, so waiting for the revolution (unless of course you are a Ukrainian) is simply an excuse for apathy.Government is something that happens naturally, and without your participation, it will be formed without your input. It is unavoidable. Until nationalists and paleo-conservatives start voting for less-than-perfect candidates, they will get nowhere.The world is not going to back to a dictatorship or monarchy any time soon—it’s going to be capitalist and democratic for the foreseeable future. That’s the reality, and fighting these things only on the internet is not going to help the cultural right. You cannot use politics or force either to reinstate traditionalism. It has to come organically. What politics is used for is to create conditions where that can happen. And as countries like Israel and Japan have shown, as well as various eastern European countries, it is possible to have a democratic and capitalist state while retaining a cultural and ethnic nationalist foundation for society. This should be our primary goal, and within that move to a better system later.If this is taken into account, then nationalists and the right need to stop viewing politicians as vehicles for only their specific ideology. Because to survive politically, no matter how pure of heart a politician is, he will not survive unless he is tactically prepared and can make tough calls and appeal to various facets of society that are opposed to our cultural heritage. What this means is understanding when a politician makes an ideological move versus a political concession. Here in America, land of obnoxious optimism and everlasting smiles, when things don’t go our way, we drop off and turn out. We stop voting. We stop engaging. This is not the right course of action.A good politician in my opinion is a smart, shrewd man who stands up for his beliefs, but knows when not to fight. He knows when to take a dive, like Brewer did. He knows when to back down. He should ideally (pun intended) be a mix of political shrewdness and staunch beliefs. A man who cracks an egg to make an omelet, so to speak.If a candidate claims he supports the wrong countries and opposes “racism”(anything pro-Western culture, conservative, or white), but while in office stops sending aid to those countries and ends affirmative action, is that not better than a man who does the exact opposite? This is why looking at policy and action is more important than words. Politicians tell people what they want to hear. They always will. And if we want a guy in the White House who is on our side, we are going to have to hear a lot of pandering to the cultural left. It’s the cold, hard reality.Let's look at Ron Paul again. In the early '90s he released newsletters in his name (which were most likely not authored by him, but were still published by him with his approval) that contained race-realist sentiments that bordered on racist for many people not attuned to the language of the cultural right. They also included a variety of culturally conservative “Angry White Male” statements which characterized his world view as both pessimistic and traditionalist. Still, Dr. Paul disowned them and refused to take responsibility for them, because he knew they would be politically damning, and rather stupid to do so. Again, a shrewd and good move. Regrettably, many on the cultural right now call Paul a traitor with a globalist agenda. He isn’t a white nationalist, but he is also not a cultural liberal.So if we, the cultural right, want to accomplish anything, we can’t only go for purists. That simply is not possible in this climate. We have to transition to a climate where this is possible, and to do this, we need less-than-pure men right now.All politicians and all leaders do things we dislike. It is the nature of leadership and politics. It can’t be avoided. We need a politician who can play the game as well as stand for a core ideology we support. We need to understand which is the better move in specific situations. We need to transition to a better world, a better country, and a better society, but right now we need someone who can get elected. We need to understand it’s about creating conditions for our traditional culture and identity to exist, and that by voting tactically, we can achieve the gradual transition to a better society. But first we need a reality check.