This is probably the most intelligent group of right-wing thinkers I've encountered on the internet so far.
It wasn't until maybe two years ago when I came across the kia2 reddit and discovered people who understood the truths of this world - whose arguments convinced me to start caring more about politics & to stop being a fence sitter. For that, I thank all of you.
I'm simply curious as to how any of you would describe your ideology. Libertarian? Nationalist? Generally anti-globalist? I see a lot of tradcon bashing and I know most of you aren't fans of mainstream Republicans.
Also, are there any real-world politicans you would like to see dominate the national stage? (Much like how the "socialists" want to see Bernie as president).
My preferred label is America First Nationalist.
Other labels would be anti-communist, anti-wokeist, anti-feminist and anti-globalist.
I think both Jerry Falwellian traditional conservatism and neo-conservatism(only useless wars and corporate tax cuts) are failed ideologies.
I think the new right needs to focus on changing the national culture by not ceding ground to the left and the whole notion of bipartisanship needs to completely end.
Wokeism, leftism, feminism and socialism need to be opposed in every form. No more compromises. No more getting caught up by wedge issues.
The right needs to focus on changing the current culture by actually using power effectively.
The politician that I want to see dominate the national stage is Ronald DeSantis. He is relatively young, well-spoken, has strong convictions and best of all he is not afraid to use his power.
Desantis is easily the best governor in the nation. I want a clone of him running Texas. For now I wholly support Abbott in order to prevent the nightmare of Robert Francis O'Rourke.
DeSantis is the best option we have right now for 2024.
Agree about Abbott. I knew he wouldn’t be primaried. I knew some people who really wanted Prather or West but I knew they had no chance.
Prather and West didn't have a chance against Abbott because Abbott's ground game is insane.
Abbott campaign people knocked on every door in my neighborhood before the primary and they even came back multiple times after the primary for the upcoming general.
The man is way too establishment tradcon for my taste but Abbott remains the safest choice to prevent a "Beto" win.
I like Allen West a lot but he couldn't win the primary since he was sadly seen as too right for many of the squishy suburban tradcon Republicans in DFW and Houston.
I hope we can get Texas's own DeSantis in 2026.
Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton will likely both try to run for governor in 2026. I would prefer someone new who is less tradcon.
Completely agree with your assessment
Wait, wait... Allen West, previously of Florida?
100%.
The Libertarian Party is the most useful in achieving the above, now that the Mises Caucus has taken over. The caucus won dominance handily because they went against and ousted the "traditional" Libertarians who compromised themselves out of relevance to curry favor with voters.
I hesitate to label myself a Libertarian, but their platform is the one that most closely represents my ideals, which square almost exactly with onetruephilosoraptor's well-articulated position here, including his opinion of DeSantis.
While the Mises Caucus gaining power in the Libertarian Party is definitely a good thing, the Libertarian Party's support for unrestricted free trade and migration (ie a porous southern border), is a hard no for me. Those two issues are at the heart of the "America First" movement.
I have my criticisms of Trump, but he was fundamentally right about trade. Unrestricted trade has crippled American industry and has made us increasingly dependent on countries abroad. The fact that we depend on Taiwan for almost all of our semiconductor chips for our cars and electronics is horrifying. Couple that with the supply chain disruptions from China's COVID policy and the fact the industrial centers of America have become rapidly impoverished over the last several decades. I'm not saying that trade is a fundamentally bad thing, quite the opposite in fact, but we need to look out for our national interests, not the interests of multinational corporations.
Regarding immigration: widespread immigration depresses wages and can radically change the culture of the host country. I understand that the United States was built by immigrants, and as I go back my family line, everyone immigrated here at some point or other. But the United States is no longer half undeveloped wilderness. It made sense to greatly encourage mass immigration in the 19th and even early half of the 20th century. But now, we need to be far more selective. And assimilation is an absolute must. You can keep your food, music, and other superficial parts of your culture, but you need to learn English and embrace American cultural values. The millions of illegal immigrants that we have coming across our border is appalling and must be stopped. There is no hope for assimilation with those numbers. By crossing our border illegally, they are already rejecting our system of laws, as well. The amount of drugs and sexual trafficking that is occurring across the U.S,. border is staggering. We cannot continue to ignore this issue.
I have to agree with your point about immigration.
As of now, the Mises caucus advocates a conservative approach to immigration policy until such time as what they call "the privatization of border control" can happen (whatever that means). I'm beginning to look at various think tanks' research on "privatized border control" and so far it appears to be pretty vague, or at least really complicated.
I think in the short term, Libertarians elected to office will at least make moves toward decentralization of state power. I can see local and state offices being held by Libertarians of the Mises variety as a step in the right direction.
I've heard a lot of people say that DeSantis is a lot better off staying in Florida where he has some measure of power rather than diluting himself in DC, although I'm not au fait with the matter myself so I can't say for sure either way.
Pro freedom, pro personal responsibility, anti censorship, anti centralized power, anti child abuse.
Basically a 90s liberal in the wrong generation.
Lol 90s liberals didn't support any of what you do minus anti child abuse
90s liberals were about fighting the power, maaaaan! or was that 80s?
Nationalist, just on the edge of Christian authoritarian. I'm not even Christian but realize now that they basically got everything right.
As a start roll back pretty much everything to 1850 and figure out where to go from there. Possibly 1750 would be better.
Yep. The Enlightenment has failed.
The Romanticists were right-- man is an emotional creature at heart, and we need to act accordingly in the political sphere. We need heroism and earnest spirituality (both within and without!) to combat the monsters that men can become.
Dammit that was going to be my reply.
After the last few years, I'm now just to the right of whatever Genghis Khan was.
Conan the Barbarian: Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.
Genghis Khan: Crush your enemies, wipe out their civilization, and breed all their women for a million heirs.
Yes, correct - somewhere between these two;).
Fuck if I know. Anti-communist nationalist I guess. I've never really been a fan of labels. I can give my stance on various things and I don't really fit neatly into any political box. A take I have that's pretty spicy irl but neither major party would agree with is that I think the vast majority of people shouldn't be able to vote (restrict it to people who've volunteered their time for military or civil service).
Another example, my stance on immigration is that it should be severely curtailed because it drives down workers' wages (a traditionally leftist viewpoint) and because letting in untold millions in such a short time like we've been doing prevents assimilation and is leading to demographic replacement (an apparently far-right viewpoint when it concerns the West). At the least put a hold on any forthcoming immigration for, probably 4 or 5 decades at minimum. edit: here's another leftist take that informs my view, our current immigration policies incentivize the best and brightest of the world to come here. Yes that's good for us but their home countries need them to make their shitholes less, well, shit.
As for real-world politicians.... I quite like DeSantis but if there are other politicians similar to him I want them to come into their own too. We can't just put our country's hopes in one person. An American equivalent to Eric Zemmour would be nice too.
Dickensianism.
I believe without any irony that humanity reached its peak immediately prior to electrification. The state of the valuation of labor, the amount of manual labor needed to sustain a certain standard of living, the valuation of energy, and the energy cost to transport energy to where it was needed had reached an equilibrium point.
What disrupted that balance was energy that required essentially nothing to transport. It will take centuries for society to adapt to a new normal where human labor is essentially valueless because of free transport of energy to wherever it's needed.
Feminism basically doesn't happen, AT ALL, without the electric washing machine and the electric kitchen.
This is a great insight.
Every innovation since the Steam Engine has been devaluing labor and craftsmanship, replacing the artisan with the factory worker has been a disaster.
The outsourcing of energy production (and the effort and pollution entailed) lets polite society exist and denigrate the rural plebs who actually have to fight nature for the fuel which keeps the lights on.
The 'Green Revolution' is predicated on renewables making the blue collar unnecessary, which is why it is so monstrous and doomed to fail-- the whole left, from trans through green, all the way to revolutionary Marxism is an attempt to divorce Mother Nature. Minting 'a new man' from a 'tabula rasa' that doesn't exist.
Good fucking luck, Utopians. I hope you catch reality in the teeth. Hard & soon.
The steam engine was revolutionary but society survived contact with it. It was a self-limiting technology because it doesn't scale DOWN well. Even internal combustion wasn't a serious disruptor.
The Amish draw the line at electricity, not engines (many communities use gas tractors), and for good reason. Electricity divorced the use of the energy from the production of the energy. It was too convenient. Too scalable. It's impact on the individual was far greater.
Wow! What an eclectic outlook. A feast for thought.
I don't know what a satisfactory label for my views would even be anymore.
I second that.
There isn't really a convenient label that summarizes the beliefs of those here.
Raised in a Republican household. Christian and have some libertarian leanings now. Socially more conservative
Above all I want the federal government's impact in my life to be absolutely minimal. I'm fine with states tinkering with their own versions of governance. Socialized healthcare may actually work in Vermont while being a train wreck in Tennessee. Empower the bottom, not the top. Let states, counties, and municipalities make determinations about healthcare, education, crime, etc, and get federal money out of the equation as much as possible.
Energy - we need to deregulate and pass laws giving energy companies greater protections against lawsuits from eminent domain issues (the pendulum swings back and forth on this over the decades but right now building pipelines is a nightmare). We need a long term energy policy that encourages the expansion of refinery capacities. It's a bottleneck and it's getting worse, with no hope on the horizon.
Our mental health system has never been worse, and deinstitutionalization has caused a humanitarian crisis that's only noticeable when some wayward sick person shoots up a school.
Keep your hands off my guns.
I'm an antiparty independent. I dislike the party system and how it works. If given a choice, I would have them all abolished and force them to prove themselves by their own actions. I've been voting Republican only because Seattle was destroyed by democrats, and seems to be continuing down that path no matter what happens.
I don't even know.
Catholic nationalist. Jesus and my country in first place.
I was "left-wing" (wanted to be left alone) until that was no longer a left-wing position, just like the vast majority of GamerGate OGs.
This is me too.... I just want to be left alone, and I'm all for leaving everyone else alone to their gay marriages and sex changes. Just leave me out of it.
So far right that I've horseshoed back to far left. I don't think Fight Club is supposed to be right wing but here we are.
If anything I'd maybe categorize Fight Club as anarcho-primitivism? I remember it being very much in the vein of Uncle Ted's work
Ted's is a manifesto who's time is fucking neigh. And has been for years.
Right-wing in that I value hierarchy and order and that society should be more aligned with our biological nature. I also think that some inter-personal conflicts are inherently unsolvable without violence, so I am not a libertarian.
Anti-managerialist above all. I hate the managerial state and pray to whatever god who will listen that I see it crushed in my lifetime. It is why so little changes in terms of government when you move from say a left-wing area to a right-wing one. It is why the world shut down for two years and why some people here can't legally work anymore.
Nationalist as a matter of external policy. Not sure about as a matter of internal policy as I see the cultural homogenizing forces of the 20th century as a net negative. I would probably tend towards some sort of localism with each locale being mostly self-sufficient for necessities and trade being primarily for luxury goods.
My dislike of tradcons is mostly due to it being a thin, performative version of the values held by our ancestors that is in many ways nearly indistinguishable from modernity. And which ignores the specific peoples which followed the traditions. Go back 50 years and it was common for parents to disown their children for miscegenation. Why do tradcons not want to return to that tradition?
Rights for the right, none for the left
Paleocon is probably the best term for me, but I'm far more 'Dissident Right' and small-L libertarian as well, as a result of being American.
I'm fond of the term "Neo-Traditionalist." Mainly because I'm trying to find a version of Traditionalism that won't straight up fail the way the Tradcons have. There has to be a hybridization of good ideas to combat the rot pervasive in the present system, some combination of useful societal traits that can resist the decay-- but I have yet to find it.
The Tradcons are obsessed with maintaining the form of the traditions instead of the people who created and maintained them and as such were destined to fail.
How can you maintain traditions when it's so common for people to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from their home town? Or to have to move hundreds or thousands of miles every 5-10 years? When factories moved to Mexico and the economies in those old factory towns hollowed out, did Tradcons like Mitt Romney and George W Bush care about this? Or did they help it along?
Let alone attempting to maintain traditions when you're importing people with different ones. Many of the Tradcons I grew up around were farmers who hired illegal alien farm labor and would balk at any suggestion that the border be closed because it might hurt their farm. Now Hispanics are the overwhelming majority population in that area, and the traditions these Tradcons claimed to hold dear will die because the people who live there now have their own traditions which they care about instead.
Any "Neo-Traditionalist" I think needs to start with the people and focus on maintaining them. Encourage people and families to stay in a place for generations and discourage outsiders (you need some, but you don't need to encourage it; and they certainly don't need to wield political power on day 1). The traditions themselves will fall out from that.
Right wing populist.
While I do care about things such as public decency and keeping porn away from kids, I do not support the violent/obscene media restrictions the tradcons want.
I'd like to call myself a minarchist, since true libertarian ideals are just that, idealistic. They would collapse the second that a collectivist enemy formed.
Government is an unfortunate but necessary evil. That being said, it can be kept to a minimum, but it requires the attention and active participation of all the individuals to keep it that way. What we are seeing today is the result of complacency by individuals not monitoring and preventing the growth of the government.
Ultimately I'm anti authoritarian, and prioritize my own country over others.
I assure you I am not. That doesn't mean others won't I guess. I just wanted to fulfill a curiosity.
Anti-state, pro-community
I was about to come up with some sort of blurb and I scrolled to the bottom and this was really a much shorter way to say it than I ever could have. I used to say I was libertarian, but in reality it was always the part being against a huge awful socialist state that led me there. The community part being a newer development for me in the past few years.
I'm anti-feminist above all, of course.
Real world politicians I like...I think I'd just like to see Trump come back. He's made a few missteps, but I still trust him over the other options.
DeSantis got a lot of praise for cutting off the trans kids idea, but he only did that when it started affecting girls. He didn't give a fuck before that. I think people will get a rude awakening about him.
All of the above, to varying degrees. Although I don't like labels (original, I know), politically I am probably first and foremost a libertarian.
They're not politicians (yet), but I like some of the more outspoken libertarians/anarchists, like Dave Smith and Michael Malice. Dave's people recently took over the Libertarian party, too, and he may run for president. He won't win, unless something ridiculously drastic happens in the meantime, but I'd love to see him get his say on the national stage. It would be a bit like Ron Paul all over again.
senator armstrong
Anti-government.
Reluctant White Nationalist.
I didn't want this position but once you acknowledge the reality of racial disparities and behavioral tendencies, along with the overt efforts to stoke hostilities against people of European blood...well it just makes the most sense strategically.
Accelerationist.
Dissident Right. It's still a safe name for now and I think it frames me correctly, being a right winger who is dissident, aka opposing the prevailing state (and State).
Hard to describe my Ideology, right now I'm very enamored with studying power, and I think I would prefer a private property or monarchical society just because I find Democracy mostly an exercise in perverting hierarchies which I want to enforce even further, not abolish at all.
I don't like anyone, the only reason Trump sold me was his promise to fight the swamp, and we all know how that went. Moldbug is right that the Republicans are the Outer Party, running defense for the Empire/Cathedral.
The books I'm reading probably tell more about me than anything else, I just finished Man, Economy, and State and I just got The Populist Delusion.
Wow, that's a tough one. I guess anti-collectivist, individualist, egalitarian, nationalist, minarchist center-leftist?
How can you be a nationalist and an anti-collectivist simultaneously?
The individual is sacred and sovereign, over everything else. A nation is important for an individual, because a culture gives the individual roots that the individual can choose to embrace, and that they can find meaning and inspiration in. A nation is a good thing and should exist (though nations should be allowed to naturally balkanise and break up into smaller groups that better represent its citizens), and a nation should fervently protect the rights of the individual, and significantly prioritise citizens over foreigners (that's why the distinction is there after all). Nationalism is required to protect against globalist homogenisation.