RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Politics of Angst

June 15, 2014 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

35:41

The Politics of Angst

Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer discuss David Brat, Iraq, and the “politics of angst.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	So, Paul Gottfried, thanks for joining me.
	Oh, thank you for having me on.
	Well, Paul, what do you think happened in Virginia this past Tuesday?
	Well, I think that the Republican establishment obviously underestimated the vulnerability of their whip, their house whip, Cantor, who...
	It seems to have made some very, very big mistakes in terms of failing to understand the reaction against amnesty in the United States, particularly in the wake of what President Obama has done to encourage illegals to come into the United States,
	and a free market Quasi-libertarian opponent, Bratt, David Bratt was able to win the primary and will be running for Congress as the Republican candidate from Cantor's district.
	I think that although Bratt would like to see this race as being about who supports free enterprise and capitalism, the pivotal issue was immigration.
	It was the fact that he took a strong anti-immigrant or at least a strong position against the amnesty bill that I think won him the race, despite the fact that he spent less than $200,000, which was chicken fee, in comparison to the $5 million that was made available to Cantor.
	No, I think that in itself was pretty amazing, the fact that he did this.
	And then also, I think it was also interesting just how polling seems to have been brought into question.
	It seemed like Cantor was quite confident that victory was in his grasp.
	He was 30 percentage points ahead.
	I don't think I've ever seen a similar situation where polls were that wrong.
	I think that's, again, a remarkable thing, and I don't even know exactly quite what to make of it.
	I mean, I would say...
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, I would know what to make of it.
	I think polling is very often ordered by politicians, and the pollsters work for them.
	And if these were Republican establishment pollsters that Kante was using, it is not at all surprising that he had him out in the lead, in a comfortable lead, winning by 30%.
	Well, yes and no.
	Surely they don't want to give someone bad information.
	Then no one would want to hire them again.
	I think in terms of doing internal polling, I think the politicians do want to know the truth.
	I really have two minds about this.
	He screwed up the polling and the presidential race, and he still pretty much is able to run the Republican establishment.
	Everything that he says is...
	But he seemed to be denying...
	Well, yeah, that's true.
	Although he has, I think his reputation has really gone down.
	But remember, he and, what's his name, Dick Morris, were almost in denial mode for a series of months.
	I think they were denying the polling more than they were believing some crazy other poll.
	They seem to just be denying reality.
	We don't have to go back to that two years ago or one and a half years ago, but I did find it amazing.
	You would look at people who were serious demographers and how it was so clear that Obama was going to win.
	And then if you looked at the Drudge Report or Fox News, it was really like you were in an alternative universe.
	Yes, it was.
	It was kind of amazing.
	You're still in an alternative universe because I discovered the only reason that Brad won was that Democrats came out en masse to vote for him.
	Well, according to George Will, people really didn't care about immigration.
	The big issue was that Kanto did not visit his district often enough.
	Right.
	Well, I think that is total nonsense.
	I mean, we're in an alternative universe of these kind of liberal Republicans like George Will.
	But the one thing I would say, though, is that this seems to fit a familiar pattern.
	And that is that, I mean, let me set this up for a little bit.
	I think...
	Brat is clearly an intelligent guy and someone who at least wants to think about these issues.
	After reading some of his...
	Brief snippets from some of his writings on theology and economics.
	I can't say that I agree with anything from his worldview.
	But nevertheless, he clearly has least ones to think about these things, which sets him apart from many politicians, probably most all of them.
	But that being said, there seems to be this familiar pattern where there's a...
	There's a wave of very negative social mood.
	And I'm thinking about, say, the midterms of 2010 and particularly following after the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, 2009.
	And then, you know, it just kept getting worse.
	You had the Tea Party.
	So you have all these people who are – it's basically just total negative energy.
	And I don't – I'm not – Putting a value judgment on whether that's good or bad.
	I'm just saying it's about hating the establishment or the existing politicians and wanting to throw them out.
	And so a lot of these people, like Brad, again, I don't really...
	I think he's a smart guy in comparison to the rest of them, but I don't think he's really a brilliant operative.
	I think he just had a surfboard and he just rode this wave of negative energy.
	I don't think...
	He did anything in particular.
	If he had run in 2004 or 2008, he probably would have lost by 30 points to Cantor and no one would be talking about it.
	But there's just this wave of negative mood.
	Well, but I think he also took one position on immigration that was useful.
	Right, because he tapped into the negative mood.
	Yeah, but the rest sort of sounds like the kind of stuff that libertarians talk about.
	You know, we might have seen Cato publishing some of these statements.
	However, most of those libertarians want open borders.
	They're in favor of massive immigration to keep the labor supply here, and people should be able to do a transferable label and be able to cross borders, etc.
	Paul, you don't understand.
	If we bring in 25 million unskilled workers, that will only benefit American workers.
	You just don't understand.
	Arithmetic doesn't apply to this.
	No, I'm being sarcastic.
	Of course, we're totally screw workers.
	Yeah, but I think the point is that he was smart to take the anti-immigration position, because that is what distinguishes him from other libertarians, who probably would have simply failed miserably against Cantor.
	Yeah, but what I'm getting at here is that we seem to see this familiar pattern where you have all this negative mood, people are mad, and they'll vote for someone because they get a sense, ah, he's against amnesty, whatever.
	But they basically elect these...
	Fairly, you know, high-minded libertarian types who I don't think will really do much of anything to change what's bothering them.
	Like, I think they have a sense.
	I think a lot of white people, this district is fairly well off.
	I mean, if you think about Republicans voting in the 7th District, this district includes Richmond and Culpeper and some places like that.
	These are pretty, you know...
	People who are voting in a Republican primary, I would guess middle class to upper middle class white people, and they see, you know, they have a sense of angst, they have a sense that they're losing it, and then they vote for someone, oh, let's throw the bums out, let's vote for this guy.
	But then this guy is this kind of libertarian...
	Somewhat goofy, though high-minded, you know, professor.
	And he won't do anything to help them.
	And then the process begins again in six years.
	So it's just, it's a kind of predictable wave that happens.
	But I disagree with the view of this as sort of like, you know, pushing up the rock of Sisyphus.
	I think what you'll see here is a growing mass of people who are associated with the same kind.
	of reaction that we see in France among those who voted for the Front National, or the people who voted in Hungary for the Jobbik party, although in Hungary you're still a much more conservative country than you have in Western Europe and the United States, but probably some of the people who voted for UKIP were like that.
	And their presence and their protest will not go away, even if Brad turns out to be, you know, Another Paul, a Paul Ryan in disguise, or something sort of equally innocuous, because the protest is there, and the things people protesting against have not really been addressed.
	The system cannot address them, in fact, because the system is based on open borders, globalism, and multicultural ideology, together with corporate capitalism.
	And that system is not going to satisfy the 20 or 25 percent of the population that remains irreconcilably on the right.
	And that's where the votes came from that put Bratow over the top.
	I mean, you're perfectly right.
	I mean, in the sense that, you know, he might just be some goofy professor who will turn out to be exactly like the other guys who are sitting in Congress.
	But the protests won't go away.
	The protest can't be controlled.
	Excuse me?
	But the protest can and will be controlled.
	Unless it changes, it can be controlled endlessly.
	Because if all you do is articulate your discontent, your angst, in terms of some kind of no amnesty and vague free market ideology, we've seen this before and we'll see it again a thousand times.
	It will just keep going.
	It may not come with the free market ideology the next time around.
	It may come with a violently anti-capitalist message.
	As these people discover that multinational corporations are one of the chief culprits for the problems that concern them, and the large corporations are socially on the left, they favor multiculturalism, they favor open borders, and so on.
	As in the case of France, where the Front National has become very critical of capitalism, the same thing is imaginable in the United States, so that the libertarianism may drop out of the picture eventually.
	It might, but I think at least now, and maybe not even for people who are my age and younger and maybe a little bit older as well, but I think more for people who are your age, the baby boomer generation, they've gone through this Massive wave of good times, certainly since 1980.
	And it really was, you know, really since the end of the Second World War.
	And so...
	For them, the free market, that just means a bigger house or a second vacation home or another car.
	But I think maybe for people my age and people who are younger, I'm around 35, that we almost don't have that American dream at all.
	And it's a lot bleaker and it's a lot more obvious that globalism can...
	It's not always good for everyone that, you know, it might actually eliminate the kind of jobs that people want and give them, you know, jobs folding t-shirts in the gap.
	But I don't know.
	I mean, this is my prediction is that BRAT, within two years, let's say within four years, BRAT will vote for comprehensive immigration reform.
	It just won't be called amnesty.
	But it will be some weird—it will come from the Republicans, and it will be some weird free-market-y, conservative kind of thing.
	But it won't be this— Chuck Schumer and his amnesty proposal, which is easy for them to oppose.
	It will be some conservative, quote-unquote, version.
	And they'll support it because they, in a way, kind of paint themselves into a corner.
	Because when they talk about amnesty, it's about rewarding a lawbreaker.
	But that's really not the real issue.
	I mean, the real issue is that you have just a wide-open legal immigration.
	And that it's a demographic and racial displacement.
	I mean, that's the real thing.
	So just talking about amnesty, it's a euphemism, and in a way you kind of paint yourself into the corner of saying, like, okay, no amnesty, never, that would be terrible.
	But we're going to double legal immigration, because all legal immigration must be great.
	So I just think this is what's going to happen.
	I just feel like, I mean, I'm sorry, maybe I'm more pessimistic.
	Paul Gottfried.
	I agree both are bad, but I would say that amnesty is particularly bad because it doesn't just mean amnesty.
	As my son who lives in London pointed out to me yesterday, all those kids who are being put on the border and becoming a cross, these are the anticipatory signs of amnesty.
	Because they know what amnesty means is you can come into this country illegally to let you in and give you all kinds of social rights.
	And the 14th Amendment has now been interpreted as being universal, not just limited to American citizens.
	That's what came as a result of this California decision that stopped the application of Proposition 187.
	I think the amnesty is also very, very bad.
	I agree with you.
	Ultimately, we have to deal with legal immigration as well, but I think amnesty has implications going beyond this.
	It is clear to me that you are right.
	The Republican Party is committed to amnesty and further immigration, largely because of its dependence on Multinational corporations.
	Even now, they have replaced Cantor with Kevin McCarthy, a representative from California, who is much more openly and emphatically committed to the amnesty than was Cantor.
	They went up to Cantor because he equivocated.
	This guy is openly in favor of the amnesty.
	So obviously the leadership is not afraid that anything is going to happen, and they believe they can control people like Brat.
	And they may be able to, but I think the Republican Party cannot be reformed.
	As you know, that's my view.
	Because of the people who control the party, whether it's the Rupert Murdoch neoconservative media empire, the multinational corporations, or the defense industry, the Republican Party is incapable of becoming an effective vehicle for the right.
	And what we would need is another party.
	That could perform that function.
	It's not going to come out of the Republican Party.
	And I don't even think those people who put Brad over the top, many of them were in fact not regular Republicans.
	They were just people on the right who may or may not be registered.
	I'm a registered Republican at the moment.
	I was not in the past.
	You know, I think that clearly the people who voted for Brad were Republicans.
	I mean, I think actually it is an open primary, which gives it more, there's more space for others.
	Like, there is this conspiracy theory that I don't think was very significant about Democrats voting for Brad just to screw Cantor or something.
	It's been pushed hard by the Republican establishment.
	Yeah, I doubt that that played a significant role.
	But it is more open.
	That being said, remember, most people don't even follow this stuff.
	If you're voting in a primary, I think you're a pretty committed Republican.
	These are the same types of people who are in the Tea Party and so on and so forth.
	I think sometimes it's obvious what this is.
	It's about people mad at immigration, Tea Party types, older white Americans who have this angst.
	And justified angst, in my opinion.
	But you're also told things, I mean, Megyn Kelly, who's the voice of the Murdoch Empire, made a comment two days ago that, I don't know why people turn against Cantor.
	He voted, I don't know, 80 or 90% of the time with the conservatives.
	Well, I hear that all the time.
	The question is, what is it to vote with the conservatives?
	It means voting for the defense industry.
	It means supporting their crazy foreign policy, neoconservative foreign policy.
	It means voting in a certain way that favors large corporations.
	How do you vote on social issues?
	I'm sort of curious.
	How does he stand on immigration?
	Because, I mean, to me, what defines you as a conservative are primarily social issues, foreign policy.
	Much of what they consider to be conservatism, I consider to be Jacobin, the Jacobin left or something, or the Olsonianism.
	So, you know, I really don't buy the argument.
	Well, the Jacobins had a good foreign policy.
	Oh, you're right.
	It was the Girondins who were the bad ones.
	We shouldn't slander Jacobins.
	I'm sorry.
	I don't mean to compare neoconservatives to Jacobins.
	It's the Girondins.
	We've cleared war on everybody to spread democracy.
	Speaking of this Jacobin foreign policy and all of that kind of stuff, why don't we talk just a little bit about what's going on in Iraq at the moment.
	I don't think we need to focus too much on details.
	Because those are ongoing, and I'm sure by the time I even get around to publishing this podcast in the next 24 hours, things might have changed.
	There might be new developments.
	It's an ongoing situation.
	But I think, generally speaking, we're seeing something.
	Like the fall of Saigon at the tail end of the Vietnam War, where this war that began with Kennedy and a lot of pomp, and then it became extremely controversial.
	It was connected with the Cold War.
	It ended in these pathetic scenes of helicopters leaving the American embassy.
	And I think something like that is going to happen in Iraq at some point.
	And obviously there are also these things that we don't understand that we go into.
	I think one thing we clearly didn't understand when we went into Iraq was the Sunni-Shia rivalry.
	Saddam was a bastion of the Sunni Ba'ath Party, which is a kind of almost the Prussians of the Middle East, a kind of quasi-fascistic Christian party, actually, of Sunni Arabs that were dominant.
	And what has happened at the end of it is not that we've spread democracy or ended terror, but we've actually seen a new Shia dominance, where Iran, our supposed other deadly enemy, The regime that America established, which is just this irony that I don't even know where to begin.
	But let's not talk so much about the foreign policy aspects.
	Let's talk a little bit about, in a way, the domestic aspects about this.
	And we've touched on this before.
	I can remember when I first got into all this stuff, and by that I mean just reading serious political writers.
	Thinking of myself was kind of on the alternative right, so to speak, or thereabouts.
	It was probably after graduating from college and maybe just a little bit later, so in the beginning of the 2000s, right at the heart of the debate over the Iraq War.
	And at that point, it really seemed like the paleoconservative movement or the alternative right was defined by foreign policy.
	It was defined by being skeptical.
	George W. Bush and all this kind of stuff.
	And that really was what defined us, at least for a number of years.
	And I think in some ways now we're at the end of it all.
	And this foreign policy, I think clearly the American global hegemony is weakening.
	We might have a force.
	The centrifugal force pulling back into the center.
	We are not a decisive global actor.
	We are not the indispensable nation of global affairs.
	And so I'm kind of curious where this leaves us.
	Sorry, that was a very long-winded way of asking a question.
	But what do you think about all this, Paul, in the sense of, to put it in a nutshell, the fact that the paleocons or the alt-right or whatever you want to call it was really defined by foreign policy over the last 15 years.
	And now that's almost coming to an end.
	Now that whole era, the W era, is decisively over.
	Well, I think that the paleoconservatives not only criticized the Iraqi war, but they also went after the neo-Wilsonian assumptions on which it was based.
	They were absolutely correct in what they said, but they had absolutely no influence that I can see on the political debate.
	The media, both liberal and neoconservative media, excluded them from discussion.
	So they didn't matter.
	Even if they were right, they were not listened to because they were considered to be the far right.
	They were not the part of the right with which the left wanted to engage in dialogue with.
	And, of course, the neoconservatives did everything they could to destroy the credibility, the economic well-being or whatever of the paleoconservatives who were not reconciled to neoconservative domination of the right.
	So they had no influence.
	They were right, but they had no influence.
	It's just like, you know, someone like George Kennan was right about many things, and probably had no influence on them, but far more than the paleoconservatives did.
	Now the paleoconservatives have no influence, and they're not saying anything particularly relevant, with the exception of Pat Buchanan, who is one of the few paleoconservatives who does get listened to.
	But not entirely by paleoconservatives.
	I think a lot of younger people listen to Buchanan as well.
	But I don't think the paleoconservatives, as a group within the conservative movement, have any influence anymore.
	I think the average paleoconservative is probably approaching 80. Younger paleoconservatives seem to be terrified of being accused of racism.
	As we know, this has led to self-described paleoconservatives expelling other paleoconservatives for organizations because they hang out with people who read books on sociobiology.
	I think there is this fear, which I see at least among some paleoconservatives, which even calls into question their being principled at this point.
	But I don't think they have very much influence left.
	I think they will survive probably about another ten years.
	Then they will become a very, very small footnote in the history of conservatism.
	Well, you know, I was thinking about this.
	I remember when I first started working at the American Conservative magazine.
	I think I might have told this story to you before.
	And it was in 2007, and I was there with Scott McConnell and Keira Hopkins.
	And we were watching this Republican debate, a presidential debate that was happening very early.
	So you had all these McCain and Ron Paul was there and some other people who have become forgettable, Giuliani and so on and so forth.
	And with the exception of Paul, of course, they were all doing this hyper pro-war stuff.
	And Scott McConnell said, you know, I I guess a little bit morbidly, but jokingly, that, wow, we have really had no influence whatsoever on the Republican Party.
	And I think that was true.
	And that's true, but at least they fought the fight.
	You know, Amcon really going after the neocons, being explicit about it.
	I thought that was quite brave.
	But if you look at it now, where they've ended up, now that foreign policy is no longer a decisive issue, and I think they did not affect the decline of the empire whatsoever, but it is declining.
	So some other factors affected it.
	Well, but they've also moved noticeably to the far left.
	Well, that's what I mean.
	I wouldn't even call it the far left.
	I mean, I would say, like, Rod Dreher, I can't imagine anyone reading him.
	Well, he's a kind of insipid leftist.
	But no one would read him who's not some kind of suburban housewife.
	I mean, it's totally meaningless nonsense for women, where he writes about his little sister Ruthie.
	Try Noah Millman.
	Well, Noah Millman is just some kind of Jewish leftist from New York.
	I mean, pretty predictable.
	But even the rest of them, it's just this kind of non...
	Non-decisive, non-offensive, vague conservatism that really, again, it doesn't affect anything, really.
	It's just kind of like, oh, look, I'm not going to offend anyone.
	What is conservative about them?
	I mean, I can't find anything conservative.
	Well, they're conservative in the most basic sense of the word, in the sense that they're just kind of perpetuating the status quo.
	Again, they don't challenge anything.
	In a way, they're deeply conservative in the worst possible sense of the word.
	Well, they're conservative in the sense that they accept the letter to status quo and defend it.
	Yeah, basically.
	In Burkean language or something.
	In Burkean slash Catholic slash Rothbardian language, they defend.
	Modern America.
	Or apologize for it, at least.
	But they don't claim to be paleoconservative anymore.
	A lot of the paleoconservatives, I've noticed, are just extreme Catholics, or Catholic converts, or something like that.
	They were not, when I wrote about the paleoconservatives, I coined the term when I wrote about them back in the 1980s, they were not what they are now.
	Right.
	Oh, no.
	Yeah, I mean, you even found people among them who were interested in IQ questions and sociobiology.
	I mean, Tom Fleming was a zealot of sociobiology.
	Now, of course, he's an extreme Catholic convert or something.
	Well, I would say the Sam Francis element seems to have, you know, it departed with Sam, sadly, who died around 10 years ago.
	And that is very sad.
	I just think they're wandering all over the place because they're old, they have no effect on anything, nobody listens to them anymore.
	I think there will be a right, but it will have nothing to do with paleoconservatism.
	And I say this as somebody who is, for better or worse, identified as a paleoconservator who coined the term, who writes about them.
	I think they've had no effect.
	A right will survive, but will not be a paleoconservative right.
	Interesting.
	What do you think will be some of the defining features of the new right?
	What I think will be its defining feature is the willingness to make friend-enemy distinctions, use Kohlschmidt's term, and probably a sense of ethnicity, broadly understood.
	Like, you know, defending Western men or something like that against invasion, it probably will have some kind of racial overtone or undertone.
	I think it's unavoidable at this point.
	It is unavoidable because that's the way we live in.
	It is unavoidable because the whole left is organized as an anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western, anti-Bush.
	Well, of course, you're anti-bourgeois as well, but the left is an anti-bourgeois kind of coalition.
	So, I mean, obviously, what they've organized themselves against will react by being racial.
	There's no way out of this.
	Well, like all other anti-bourgeois...
	It could also be masculinist or something, or favor male virility or something like that.
	It will look much more like fascism, I would argue, than like...
	Well, you know, this is an interesting thing.
	Obviously, I resonate with everything you're saying, but this is an interesting thing that I maybe hadn't thought of, which is that paleo and neoconservatives, they're in a way kind of twins, and they're both going down together.
	Because, again, whether...
	I guess it depends on how you define the neoconservatives, but I define them strictly as this generation of Jewish intellectuals, and a lot of them have married one another, it's actually quite remarkable, who certainly came from the Trotskyist left and began voting for Reagan and then developed a very...
	Aggressive foreign policy and would often define it in terms of either supporting Zionism or spreading freedom or whatever.
	But I would define it as those.
	That is also going away because whatever you want to think of as Obama, as he's a leftist or what have you, you can see he doesn't have his heart in any of this foreign policy stuff.
	Like Bush did.
	No, he didn't.
	He just doesn't believe in it.
	He doesn't really want to do it.
	I think the Syria situation was amazing, where he was just passed the buck to Congress, and it was kind of like, well, I don't want to do this, but maybe you guys can go evade Syria.
	And then he just forgot.
	It was all forgotten a month later.
	I thought it was remarkable.
	And, you know, so I think in a way, both the paleos and the neos are kind of dying together.
	I wish what you were saying is true.
	I think the neocons will be hanging on for a very long time because of their power structure.
	They have the money, they have the media connections, the corporate capitalists lavish them with gifts.
	They might die from being overweight and from being so sybaritic because of all the money and the perks that they have.
	I do think that there is no market for what their foreign policy doesn't exist in the United States.
	However, they have all this power.
	And what I think they may do is keep quiet, if it's possible, for them to do this.
	Keep quiet about foreign policy.
	They get one of their nondescript candidates, elected president, and it's someone like Ryan or Jeff Bush or somebody like that.
	But they'll then surround that person with their friends, and they probably will push us into more neoconserved wars.
	Eventually, they probably will lose influence.
	I think the problem is they do not in any way represent a real right.
	They're part of the left, which has allied itself with corporate capitalists.
	They have nothing to do with the right.
	By the way, I'm not praising the right.
	I'm simply describing the right.
	When I talk about an ethnic right, one that does not favor the status quo, one that reacts against the left in a massive violent fashion.
	I'm not praising these people, but this is the right.
	And at some point, it is going to emerge here and in Europe.
	I don't think it's going to happen tomorrow, but I think people can just be pushed around so far, and there is going to be a reaction to what's taking place.
	I think that in its own small way, this has begun in Virginia.
	I think the people who voted for Brad, they may have voted, I agree with you, for somebody who's innocuous, who may end up voting with the Republican Party, but they are very, very fed up with immigration.
	And they may soon get fed up with the privileges given to blacks as a victim group, the gay movement, the feminists, all the rest of this politically correct victimology.
	It may come to bother people, particularly if the economy goes south, as I think it will.
	I can't see a real right-wing movement developing here, as it has in Hungary, as it has developed in France and other places.
	We have at least the same percentage of people here who are on the right.
	I think this is probably going to happen.
	This will certainly not be neoconservative controlled.
	And it also will not be paleoconservative.
	Well, something to keep our eyes on.
	Paul, let's just put a bookmark in the conversation, but I'm sure we'll do it again in the foreseeable future.
	So thank you for being on the program.

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