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American New Right Update

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The updated American New Right blog has many new essays well worth reading, including some material by our regular participant Quagmire. These include critiques of Anti-Racist Action, Noam Chomsky, the “ongoing pussification of American culture ,” and even a defense of Yours Truly against a leading critic. Check it out.

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  1. Thanks for the exposure. The ANR blog had been lying dormant for quite some time, and hardly anyone reads it it seems.

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  4. Rj, Thank you. Even though I must point out it’s not my blog but rather a collectively shared blog of which I am but one contributor. Charles main problem is that he is focused more on leftist cultural pieties than on real analysis of and opposition to the system as it currently stands.

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  5. Some of Johnson’s writings on certain topics are actually quite good. For instance, his anti-cop stuff and some of his economic writings. But, yes, he fits the stereotype of the fanatical anarcho-leftoid perfectly. Last year, during my conflagration with the left-libertarians, he placed lengthy tirades on probably half a dozen different blogs concerning my views on immigration. And he’s a more fanatical feminazi that most actual female feminazis. My guess is he has some weird psychological hang up concerning gender, sex, rape, and the other stuff he goes on his tirades about.

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  7. “Keith, it’s not the left libertarian or counter economic lectures that cause the bleeding… it’s the “anti-everything” rhetoric. The left has no problem contributing to the political division between us, in fact, they’re actually proud to draw the line and openly annunciate the radical disjuncture, and this is interesting, pro-separation but anti-segregation, there’s no waking Johnson up from his traditionally induced social coma.”

    Oh, believe me, I know. I’ve been dealing with this stuff for years, long before there ever was an ALL. When I first became involved with the left-anarchist movement in the mid-80s, even then the prevailing idea was that to be an anarchist you had to accept all of this party line dogma about every issue under the sun. All of the isms, archies, and phobias, of course, and some uber-left party line on every form of human activity or every controversial issue that could ever arise. I never really bought into that way of thinking. Even back then, I looked at it like anarchism is just a political theory regarding the state, with nothing to say about personal morality, private lifestyle issues, the norms of voluntary or non-state communities or organizations, social customs or cultural values beyond the political and so forth. Of course, I’ve explored that idea much further since then.

    “Johnson and former ALL associates have accused me of “village fascism” and “marching with monarchists” under the banner of anarchism using a hyper-relativist philosophy as a seemingly all-inclusive rationale for it.”

    Who are these “monarchists” they’re talking about? The Hoppeans?

    “I’ve even been told that our proposal of pluralism is a “front”, that we seek to advance the agenda of our own particular sub-group, and that our pluralism (behind the mask) is contextual to certain often dogmatic norms which is to say that people would only be allowed to have their subsystem within the limits of OUR metasystem.”

    But many of us come from different subgroups, and how could our metasystem be more open-ended that it is? What are these “dogmatic norms”? It sounds like they’re just seeing what they want to see.

    “In other words, some of these people truly believe we are working to sneak in a pet authoritarian system in a localist manifestation.”

    What is this “pet authoritarian system”? It’s obvious that what those guys really object to is that in a pluralist system there might actually be institutions, organizations, associations, and communities that don’t share they’re preferred outlook on how to go about doing things. In other words, what they’re really demanding is complete and universal uniformity which can only be done within the context of totalitarianism. Every human activity has to conform to their notion of “tolerance” and egalitarian moralism. Every human organization has to reflect their preferred model of organization. Actually, I doubt any form of organization could be reconciled with their efforts to blend extreme do-your-own-thing individualism with extreme egalitarianism and equally extreme leftist moralism.

    There a plenty of examples from history of actual anarchies, and they were extremely diverse cultural and organizationally. And I seriously doubt the Icelandic Commonwealth, the Celtic Irish, the residents of Zomia, the Somalian kritarchists, the Spanish collectives, Quaker Pennsylvania, the Shinmin autonomists, Iroquois confederation, etc. would really meet their standards of what “anarchy” is supposed to, i.e. a rigid application of the cultural values of a post-60s North American or Western European university sociology, ethnic studies, women’s studies, or queer studies department.

    “I’ve had a few of these guys argue that pan secession is simply anti-statist reductionism, that it is conceptually incoherent as a practical social philosophy (because it might collapse into a rehashed microcosm of statism in which “anarchy” is redefined to fit everything it opposes into itself, which reduces to a hollow concept)”

    Well, the bottom line is that “otherness” is inevitable. How do they think people with irreconcilable differences are supposed to co-exist without persecuting or exterminating one another? Maybe persecution and extermination is what they have in mind.

    I know this is a really crudely ad hominem argument, but I think the real issue with those guys is that most of them that I know anything about tend to belong to one or another kind of “alternative sexual lifestyle” and can’t seem to stand the fact that anyone would ever disagree, disapprove, look askance, or be amused by any of that. Over and over again, I have noticed when dealing with anarcho-leftoids, of which the folks we’re discussing now are an obvious subset, is what they really oppose much more than the state, capitalism, or anything else is private prejudice or discrimination against groups favored by leftists. Hence, their fanatical “anti-racism.” However, there tends to be very few actual racial minorities in left-anarchist circles, so what does that leave?

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  8. “Yea, again, I’ve only come into contact with a few logical-consequentialist arguments (results being the ‘more states but smaller states’ VS ‘less states but larger states’ scenario)”

    When reading some of these people’s comments on their various blogs, I have trouble figuring out what exactly they think “anarchy” in practice would actually look like. I remember one of them saying something like we should be happy for the world empire that exists at present as a deterrent to Rwandan-like genocides or something like that, which doesn’t really make sense. I recall another one saying something like: “I am not free as long as one gay teenager has to sit through a Mormon church service.” I think your statement about how they never grew up is the key. They sound like permanent twelve year olds in a perpetual state of rebellion against their parents.

    “The more delusional-type critics think we’re working to advance our own agenda, that we only oppose “the state” insofar as it is competition to what practically reduces to our own pet state or would-be state, to say state-reductionism may give some particular reactionary group the freedom to turn around and impose their own authoritarianism on a smaller scale.”

    Well, I’ve tried to make it clear that what I’m advocating is a pan-secessionist movement to dissolve the central political authority into regional federations of independent, self-managed communities reflecting a wide assortment of political, cultural, and economic values, ideologies, and institutions. If this were to be achieved the entire apparatus of the federal government would disappear, including its military-industrial complex, corporate welfare system, federal secret police and paramilitary police agencies, federal prisons, the parasitical federal bureaucracy, the maze of federal regulatory agencies, the state-banking complex/credit mafia, the broadcast media monopoly, and on down the line. I thought anarcho-libertarians were supposed to be in favor of this.

    Additionally, if we abolish the state governments, then liberal communities who largely hold to the same cultural values as these left-libertarians would no longer have to be under the same roof as conservative small town and rural counties where social conservativism or theocratic religion is very strong. Hence, it would be easier to avoid state laws prohibiting abortion or gay marriage or whatever their pet issues are. Smaller political units also means greater pluralism and diversity, as more communities means more different kinds of communities, and an enhanced means to self-determination for more types of people and groups. Severe differences are handled with simple separatism rather than a perpetual war to control the central government like the present system. Ethel Leona Futo has summarized my outlook fairly well here:

    http://ethelslionessden.blogspot.com/2009/08/decentralism-for-masses-big-sort-and.html

    “This is fear talking, or hate, only fear or hate would prevent one from fighting for another’s freedom, most likely fear. They fear particular groups of people, neo-nazis, maybe- I don’t know, maybe they think we’re working in collusion with monarchists or nazis (or whomever they fear) to use reactionary propaganda sprinkled with nihilistic decadence OR a zealous conversion campaign to draw the extremists from the hard right to cheaply sneak in a new authority as the state collapses? Ha, what a conspiracy theory!”

    Well, that get’s back to what I’ve always said about these “hard left” people. They consider their real enemy to be “cultural conservatism” rather than the state, the empire, and the ruling class, their “anarchist” pretensions not withstanding. It’s no different from the GOP-loving “right-wing conservatives” who claim to be for “small government” yet somehow think that the military, police, prisons, and middle class entitlements are not part of the government. Most of those “conservatives” are simply “anti-liberal” or “anti-leftist” rather than anti-statist. The real enemy in their view is not the state but hippies, homosexuals, antiwar protestors, atheists, etc. The anarcho-leftoids are the same thing in reverse.

    “We’re being wedged in with everyone we’re fighting for. They almost consider us a nucleus – a nucleus made up of all (and only) the undesirable norms of society, and they are holding us guilty by association for fighting for every norm of society. I’m not a nationalist, but I’m aligned with nationalists, therefore, I’m a nationalist, hence, the nucleus.”

    Well, that’s not too far off, is it? We’re building a revolutionary vanguard to incite the lumpen, outcast layers of society against the establishment. LOL. With regards to nationalism, I see nationalism as a bulwark against globalization and imperialism. The sovereignty and self-determination of individual nations is antithetical to world governance and global empires. These leftoid-types only associate nationalism with petty chauvinist militarism like Hitler. That’s a very limited understanding of nationalism. For instance, I doubt they’ve even heard of Johann Herder. The Palestinians are nationalists. The resistance forces to U.S. imperialism in Latin America are nationalists. The anti-colonial movements were nationalist.

    “I’m also considered “racist” now, via the nucleus.”

    It goes without saying that disagreeing with a leftoid will get you branded as a “racist”, whatever that means at present.

    “It’s possible, we can’t forget the Spanish anarchists and how they confiscated and destroyed all the money in their areas and even ordered the death penalty for the use of money. The fact that they “weren’t libertarian” does not matter, what matters is that they persecuted dissimilar and unconventional views.”

    That illustrates another one of my key arguments. ANY set of values can become authoritarian and persecutorial, not just those value systems normally associated with conservatism like religion, patriotism, law and order, etc.

    “You know what’s funny, I’ve actually had libertarians from the left reverse the tables, to say the whole idea of pan secession is a form of unitarian anti-statism (activism towards uniting humanity in the name of anti-statism as some sort of end in and of itself)”

    I suppose there are worse possible scenarios than having anti-statism achieve the status of a dominant value system on a global basis. But I don’t really see my views as having a univeral application, outside of simply championing self-determination for everyone, e.g. Palestinians, Basques, Scottish, Quebecois, Chiapas, Chechnyans, native peoples worldwide, etc. For instance, my specific strategic outlook of “liberty, populism, and separatism” is intended only for the U.S., based on my assessment of what it would take to build a revolutionary movement in the U.S. that is capable of eventually bringing down the system, and basing this on some kind of rational evaluation of how U.S. politics and society actually work.

    For all I know, something entirely different might be applicable to, say, Europe or China. In Europe, for instance, security from external forces is much more of an issue. A military alliance of, say, China, India, and the Islamic countries could pose a genuine military threat to Europe. America does not really face comparable dangers, given its geographical isolation amidst two continents comprised of weak states. China has a much different society, culturally, politically, economically and historically. So Chinese anarchists would have to devise a strategy relevant to China itself.

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  9. The best answer to these uber-leftists comes from John Stuart Mill:

    “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way”

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