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Speaking as a white man, I have no problem with being a white man.
What I don’t understand is how this automatically makes me a member of the political “Right.”
It’s easy to prove that I’m a white man. A simple DNA test based upon a saliva sample proves that I have entirely European ancestry, which to me is analogous to being white. I believe that continental ancestry is the most efficient shorthand for categorizing the world’s major races.
A basic chromosome test, as well as a cursory listen to my beautifully deep voice or a rudimentary gander at the fulsome bulge in my blue jeans, would prove that I am a man. The gender binary is real. It can be proved with genetics. The political binary cannot.
Whether I, as a provably white man, am “Left-wing” or “Right-wing” is impossible to prove, and I’ll attempt to prove why.
Whenever I try to ask someone who believes in the existence of an objective political “Left” and “Right” to define them in quantifiable terms, my hand closes on a jelly-like slime which divides up and pours through my fingers.
You could perform a DNA test on someone’s skull and determine whether they had significant ancestry from continental Europe. But just as you couldn’t tell whether the brain inside that skull ever harbored “racist” thoughts, you would have no idea whether it favored Left-wing or Right-wing ideas. This is why race is real, while notions such as “racism” and “Left vs. Right” are nothing more than ephemeral social constructs that change according to a given society’s needs.
Unlike DNA tests, there is no sort of scientific metric that can establish where I stand on the political spectrum. About a decade ago, I took 18 different multiple-choice tests designed to pinpoint my political orientation, and the results only established that I was severely and hopelessly disoriented.
Up until I was about 30, because I was mostly uninformed and easily swayed by dominant cultural narratives that I naïvely figured were objective rather than biased, I identified as a liberal. Then one day, I stopped.
All I meant by identifying with the “Left” was that I believed in innate human equality and that all disparities in income, performance, etc., were caused by unfairness. I no longer believe that. As a result, I quit buying into all the guilt-tripping bullshit about whites conquering the world through the sheer force of their unique rottenness. That’s been my only ideological change in the past 30 years. So if you want to define “Left wing” as believing that people are innately equal and “Right wing” as believing they are unequal, then I’m “Right wing” only in that sense.
But the problem is, very few people will let you stop there. They insist you swallow the entire belief cluster in one bite. If you’re “Right wing,” then you have to embrace all the predictably stuffy opinions about tradition, abortion, religion, degeneracy, patriotism, monarchy, feminism, promiscuity, pornography — the whole kit and caboodle. I say fuck the kit, and to hell with the caboodle.
When most people talk about the political Left and Right, they’re never talking about only two things. They’re dredging up a panoply of factors, none of which are entirely Leftist or Rightist on their own, that range along a wide array of polarities: capitalism vs. socialism, race realism vs. race denialism, authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, modernism vs. traditionalism, moralism vs. rationalism, individualism vs. collectivism, facts vs. feelings — more lefts and rights than there are in a boxing match. There are so many lefts and rights, the terms are essentially meaningless.
The notions of political Left and Right are also elastic and perpetually in flux. They are the ideological equivalent of transvestites. In the past few generations, they’ve always lurched leftward. Like Robert Anton Wilson said, “It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.” In his Devil’s Dictionary (1911), Ambrose Bierce defined a conservative as “[a] statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” But in 2023, the roles have been switched. It appears that any group’s behavior and values change depending on whether it’s in or out of power.
At the moment it’s the Right-wingers, who’ve lost control of all the major institutions, who want to radically transform society. That used to be a Left-wing sentiment. Right now, it’s the Right-wingers who are in favor of free speech. That used to be a Left-wing sentiment, too. These days, it’s the oligarchs, billionaires, corporatists, and upper economic classes who are marinated in Leftist “woke” ideology. But it wasn’t very long ago that wealth and corporatism were exclusively associated with the Right. A generation ago, Communists were considered extremists. These days, you’re an extremist if you merely want to lower taxes and curb illegal immigration. A century ago, progressives were eugenicists. Now the idea of innate biological inequality is confined to the “far Right” and “Nazis.”
I’ve noticed that both the Left and Right, in their current incarnations, are insanely moralistic, sadistically authoritarian, aggressively anti-individualistic, voyeuristically fixated on everyone’s private business, and bitterly unhappy. We now have a “Right wing” that, like the “Left wing,” is hostile toward individualism. I propose the radical notion that modern politics, especially as they’ve been shoved through the social-media meat-grinder, have made everyone into boring, meddlesome, miserable, insufferable assholes.
Overwhelmingly, both the establishment “Left” and “Right” wings are simultaneously disdainful of “racism” and hostile toward allowing white people to organize in their collective interests.
Sure, but you’ll insist we’re not talking about the “true” Left or Right wings. And the Soviet Union wasn’t true Communism. And no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.
And ain’t it a kick in the head that the side you identify with is the good side, while the other side is the bad side? It seems almost mathematically impossible that this would always be the case, and yet somehow it is.
I’m starting to believe — and no one has been able to convince me otherwise, especially by barking at me and insulting me — that the idea of “Left v. Right” is the biggest fraudulent conspiracy theory ever concocted. I sense that it’s purposely divisive and is used mostly as a distraction — especially away from economic issues, which seem to have been drowned out by the cacophonous culture wars.
I also suspect that if people were able to unglue their heads from the Left/Right dichotomy, they might be able to convince a much broader coalition of white people that they are under attack for their race rather than their beliefs. Did it ever occur to you that these “normies” you claim you’re seeking to reach might be open to the idea that white people are being scapegoated if you weren’t browbeating them for not being as ideologically pure as you are on ten million other unrelated subjects? Have you stopped for a moment to consider that countless ordinary white people might be receptive to pro-white — or at least anti-anti-white — messages if you didn’t insist they also had to be Christian or wear suits or eat meat or smoke cigars or worship long-dead monarchs or be sexually uptight or spit on the poor?
In the microcosmic social incubator that is prison, no one gives a shit about your political beliefs, your religion, or your country of origin. Race is all they see. Maybe there’s a lesson in all that.
When someone assaults a white person on the street for being white, they don’t care about their political beliefs. A few years back, I participated in a debate with that crusty, irascible, cock-obsessed race-denier E. Michael Jones, who famously claims that race is only a “category of the mind.” Jones and I are both from Philly. When he told me that an Irish-Catholic friend of his had been murdered in North Philadelphia, a blighted urban war zone that is overwhelmingly black, I said it’s obvious his friend wasn’t murdered for being Irish or Catholic.
I never really cared about being white until I was told I had to hate myself for it. All I know for sure is that I’m a white male, so is my son, and in the current cultural environment, both the establishment Left and Right are hostile toward us.
It’s time to place biology over ideology. Genes over political scenes. Spread the message that it’s okay to be white without being Left or Right.
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Splendidly spoken, Jim! Right-on!
My ideology: ABOVE ALL, I wish White people to survive and prosper as a distinct racial group.
Other than that – the rest being details – I’d reluctantly call myself a Bleeding-Heart Libertarian.
(I don’t care about homosexuals and trans, or “degeneracy”… I don’t give a farthing about Jews, in fact, I wish ’em well.)
E. Michael Jones or Vox Day – who is worse? Hard to tell…
It’s the ADL (etc) who keep calling non-self-hating whites “nazis”.
My strategy for which is just telling them we should have left the original nazis alone.
Trust me, all the men in my family who fought in that war — and damn near all of them did — would have loved to stay home.
Back in the day left was Labor and right was Capital. A useful distinction. Today left and right mean nothing.
The fundamental difference between right and left is the reaction to the anxiety that is the normal first human reaction to change. The right becomes immobilized by this fear, certain that all change must be for the worse – just look at how terrible the world is now, since we no longer care about the lofty principles that made the past a real Golden Age, when everyone praised god and knew their place. The left on the other hand processes the anxiety into anticipation for the possibility that this may just be an opportunity to make the world a little bit better. The idealists, regrettably, of both mindsets, are filled with a trademark smug sense of righteousness that renders them priggish, vain, arrogant – and often flat-out dead wrong. Every new generation has some attention-seekers in it who fancy themselves so precociously brilliant that they have uncovered new verities about the human condition which have eluded all the poor dunderheads who preceded them. As the nuns said in sister school when I was a kid: empty barrels make the most noise.
The Left thinks they are allies of Blacks and thus will not be attacked.
There are cases of Leftists females (and yes, males) getting raped by “disadvantaged minorities”. They were in total shock that an ally and card carrying Leftist can be attacked by feral “minorities”. And they do not change their mind, and they forgive their attacker.
Jim,
You say you “have entirely European ancestry” — but your DNA test shows you’re 99.9% European, and you didn’t scroll down the test results to what else you are.
My 23andMe says I’m also 99.9% European — and .1% NAME (North-African-Mid-Eastern).*
Does that entitle me to be African-American when it suits me?
Does that mean I’m not White?
It’s not all White – Not White out there.
BTW, I came into race realism as a tree-hugger who realized I’d been dedicated to preserving other species (& subspecies) through my adult life, and it’s about time I start preserving my own (subspecies).
Further complicating reality is the fact the Earth’s apex predator has multiplied far beyond sustainability (a righteous word much abused by woke ignoramuses), which means we face the grim temptation of getting in an all-out baby-making race with anti-White dim-wits — guaranteeing a pyrrhic victory at best.
* (I saw a possibly credible account of professional ancestry-tracers throwing a trace of non-White in test results of 100% Europeans who the tracers believe to be White “supremacists,” just to mess with them. I’ll look it up upon request.)
The leftwing is full throttle jewing and totally anti-white.
The right is on board for slower jewing, and unwilling to stand up for whites.
Whites lose either way.
I agree that all human races must be preserved – like species/subspecies of plants, insects, animals etc., and, as well, noteworthy Art and Religious/Cultural Heritage from past and present Civilisations etc.
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Okay, Observator: you have pancreatic cancer. You have less than 14 months to live, guaranteed.
Are you scared? Are you ruffled? Are you worried?
WHY DO YOU FEAR CHANGE? Are you some sort of reactionary rightist who fears things? Do you look back to some sort of imaginary Golden Age when you were healthy and alive, thinking that the world was better then? It wasn’t! It isn’t! We can’t wait to be rid of you!
The death of you will merely be change, and you should embrace your cancer, embrace the possibility that a world without you, Observator, will be an observably better world for everyone else. In fact it’s not just a possibility: I can guarantee that your painful, lonely death from cancer will improve the world immeasurably.
Your death will be a blessing to humanity! Embrace change! Embrace cancer!
We’re going to have a party to celebrate. What will make it an especially fun party, will be the permanent absence of you.
Jim Goad: “… if you want to define “Left wing” as believing that people are innately equal and “Right wing” as believing they are unequal, then I’m “Right wing” only in that sense.”
As a political matter, the issue isn’t whether “people” are unequal, but whether races are. It would be crazy to deny that individuals are unequal in their various qualities and abilities. The question is WHY they are unequal. The right says it’s because of heredity, the left blames environment. If it’s heredity, then it follows that those human groups (i.e., races) with desirable characteristics are superior to those who lack them. The people who assert this are known as racists. They are the right wing.
If I’m not mistaken, Goad has always vehemently denied being a white racist, so in fact, he’s not right wing at all. He’s a leftist.
Jim Goad: “A century ago, progressives were eugenicists. Now the idea of innate biological inequality is confined to the “far Right” and “Nazis.””
Progressives don’t necessarily deny the existence of biological inequality. It’s just that, like Goad, they deny that it extends to races. But unlike Goad, who seems to have found a comfortable niche for himself pretending to be right wing, they pursue this to its logical conclusion, and deny that races even exist as anything more than a social construct.
I like Alex Linder’s definition of ‘right wing’: ‘reality oriented’. The notion of racial equality is fantasy oriented. As I keep saying: there is no Yahweh up there magically making us all equal.
There’s no white wing, true.
Left and right always sounded stupid in American life. Never having a king (except maybe Franklin Roosevelt) there is no point to the expression.
Jerry Pournelle had something like the right answer. Attitudes toward progress matter a lot. Fear of the future will hurt you. Hopefullness, with a playful dash of gallows humor, is stronger than fear.
I’d like the world to drive out of the nasty fog we’re in right now. Call it crabby optimism.
gaedhal: “I like Alex Linder’s definition of ‘right wing’: ‘reality oriented’. The notion of racial equality is fantasy oriented. As I keep saying: there is no Yahweh up there magically making us all equal.”
Linder has a great talent for making a catchy phrase. Unfortunately that one’s a little simplistic, because one man’s reality is another man’s fantasy. People who believe in the fiction called God actually think they’re the only ones with insight into “reality”.
Possibly you could make a distinction between science and religion, but even within science we can find the same disjunction. There’s this idea called the correspondence theory of truth; the idea that there’s a “reality” out there somewhere and that science is a way of progressively getting closer and closer to it. But when we look at the history of science that’s not what we find at all. The phlogiston theory of combustion has literally NOTHING to do with the current oxidation/reduction theory; the geocentric theory of the heavens has NOTHING to do with the heliocentric theory; the miasma theory of disease has NOTHING to do with germ theory, etc. Outmoded theories end up looking like religion.
One might naively think that “reality”-based creatures would be favored in the evolutionary struggle, and that those with greater insight into it would prosper, while fantasy-based creatures would fail, but that’s not always true. Humans are fragile beings who can’t readily face a hostile universe without comforting themselves by believing in fairy tales. Great empires have been built on falsehoods such as the lie of human equality.
This is why I am a utilitarian in epistemology… of sorts. Knowledge can be useful, even if, it is ultimately untrue. Even believing that Poseidon ruled the waves and caused thunderstorms and such had some utilitarian value. The theories that replaced this view are simply more utilitarian, i.e. more useful. They allow us to make greater predictions and such.
Relativity has nothing to do with Newtonianism… and yet Newtonian physics is still taught, as it works well enough for most applications.
The orbital model of atomic structure has nothing to do with the Bohr model of atomic structure… however, the Bohr model is still taught as it works well enough for electronics and chemistry.
I was having a look at the Feynman lectures, online, and he was talking about this. First he will teach you physics the wrong way—as wrong physics works well enough for things like engineering—and then he will teach you physics the right way, because the right way is needed for things like measuring the orbiting of planets.
Newton thought that the irregularites of planetary orbits was God giving the planets a nudge, every now and then. When Einstein invented relativity, this gave God even less to do!
My comparative government prof cleared this up for me 40 years ago. A spectrum is by definition one-dimensional, thus can utilize just one metric. The only criterion is one’s position on change. If you want to change to something new and untried, you’re on the Left. If you don’t like change so much– women sure don’t– you’re in the center, a literal moderate.
If you want to change back to something previous– Make America Great Again with Trump, Take Back Control with Brexit– you are reactionary, and on the right.
There are may rights (but no “Right”) because there are so many aspects of change to oppose– economic, social, religious, demographic, even onomastic. Thomas Sowell facetiously defined the “right” as anything that dared question the Left. But that’s as good a definition as any.