Vox Day’s Whiggery

This article by Quintilian at Counter-Currents reflects my own reaction to the Vox Day vs. Anglin debate:

“Secondly, the debate as to where the NSDAP should be placed along the Left-Right political spectrum is part of a phenomenon first adumbrated by the British historian Herbert Butterfield in his famous essay “The Whig Interpretation of History.” Butterfield noted that the 17th-century Whigs reinterpreted history in a manner that justified their current political positions. In other words, the Whigs viewed the past as malleable and the present as fixed. Since the Whigs viewed their political policies as the eschatological realization of a path that was fixed by God, the past had to be “re-ordered” to conform with this divine plan of progress.

The Whiggish “re-ordering” of the past has been a problem on the Right ever since William F. Buckley founded National Review. Buckley, a status-obsessed pathological narcissist, viewed politics as an evolutionary process in which William F. Buckley would become socially acceptable to liberals. Buckley seemingly has no enemies on the Left and no friends on the Right and was a serial traitor to his closest associates, throwing under the bus the John Birch Society, Joe Sobran, Revilo Oliver (the best man at his wedding), John Sullivan, and Peter Brimelow, among many others, as the evolution of Buckley’s Weltanschauung drifted ever leftward. As the Left moved further leftward, Buckley was always there chopping off the Right wing of the Right. Under Buckley’s editorship of National Review, the Overton window became essentially a one-way mirror. …

Vox’s constant celebration of himself and his use of the Randian Aristotle/Plato riff, I believe, are clear indications of his real political orientation. In his heart of hearts, Vox Day thinks of himself on the model of Ayn Rand’s pulp Zarathustras, Howard Roark and John Galt. Vox has now deigned twice to come down from Olympus and set us to rights about the true nature of National Socialism. In the end, we have learned little about National Socialism and much about Vox Day. But I am unimpressed with his vanity, cheap rhetoric, and attempts at ideological policing and purging. We don’t need another Ayn Rand or William F. Buckley. …”

I don’t have any interest in National Socialism.

Instead, it is Vox Day trying to define the Right as being synonymous with the liberal tradition and classical liberal economics that I found so shocking. In their time, these Enlightenment scribblers and political economists were the Left. The people who they were critiquing were the Right. Vox Day’s argument is that National Socialism isn’t of the Right because it was socialism.

Vox Day expands on the “Fake Right”:

“To say nothing of TVT. Anyhow, it has become abundantly clear that we right-wing omni-nationalists are the Real Alternative Right, the True Right. Because the Fake Right Clowns are not of the Right, do not believe in the Right-Left spectrum, and even openly claim that the historical ideological Right is entirely irrelevant today. Which, of course, is precisely what makes them frauds and charlatans when they attempt to market themselves as “right-wing” in order to appeal to young conservatives and libertarians, as well as disenchanted young liberals and leftists. …”

There is no “real alternative” here though.

The Alt-Right agrees with Louis Hartz that the Right in the USA, conservatives and libertarians, are all part of the same liberal tradition. Vox Day cites Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek who identified as classical liberals and disparaged traditionalism. In the USA, the Right-Left spectrum is an argument within the liberal family over the relative importance of abstract freedom and equality.

If we to return to the 18th and 19th century, we would find that the Left had its origins in Whiggery. The Left were liberals who were criticizing the existing order. They were against monarchy. They were for free trade and free market economics. They believed that the individual was prior to society which was nothing but a social contract or a bargain created by individuals on the basis of material self interest. Their doctrine was that there were abstract natural rights analogous to Newtonian physics. The bourgeoisie was the revolutionary class in the West attempting to topple the existing order.

The Right were the people who stood against all of this. The Right was for king and country, the traditional Christian social order and mercantalism. The Left was liberal, modernist and individualist. The Right was authoritarian, traditionalist and collectivist. In the USA, the only thing resembling the Right was the Federalist Party and some of the antebellum Southern reactionaries.

As the 19th and 20th century wore on and especially after the Industrial Revolution, the Left-Right spectrum changed again. The Left became associated with socialism, communism, anarchism and reform liberalism. The Right became associated with classical liberalism. In other words, the new political dynamic that emerged was a bitter argument entirely within liberalism. In the USA, conservatism vs. liberalism in the late 20th century was just an argument between liberals over the New Deal.

The Alt-Right shares with Toryism a deep unease with classical liberalism and the free market economy. We are highly suspicious of the Enlightenment notion that “all men are created equal.” As with Toryism, we believe the free market has to be restrained and subordinated to the nation, or else it will undermine and destroy the social fabric. We believe in the common good. We believe the individual is not prior to society and that our country is more than a social contract. The last thing we believe in is the elevation of economics or the glorification of the free market above our culture.

Vox Day is right that we aren’t on the same side. He is the one who is Fake Right. He is closer to the Enlightenment and Whiggery. We are much closer to Romanticism and Toryism.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
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46 Comments

  1. 18th century Whigs supported protectionism. They only became the party of free trade in the 19th century, under the influence of Cobden and Bright.

    The Tories were the free traders in the 18th century.

    (Free trade benefited the French, who in turn supported the exiled Stuarts, while tariffs, and the industries nurtured by the tariffs, financed the Royal Navy, which was necessary to prevent the return of the Stuarts)

    The Whigs also supported constitutional monarchy, and Whigs were just as prominent as Tories in the 1754 fight to repeal the 1753 Jewish naturalization act.

    It was only during the 1760s, under the influence of the Enlightenment, that a small faction of the Whigs known as “radicals” broke away and started transitioning into classical liberals.

    In the 19th century, under the influence of Disraeli, Toryism became imperialism, as worthless as the neocons.

    Whigs=leftwing=bad, Tories=rightwing=good, is false.

    Whigs were the representatives of the genuine Anglo-Saxon traditions of ordered liberty, limited monarchy and Protestantism, while the Tories flirted with continental imports such as absolute monarchy and crypto-Catholicism.

    • You raise an excellent point: Why is it only the Catholics who understand political science nowadays? I want nothing to do with the Papacy, yet I find myself lumped with the Catholics, because they’re the only ones with much political sanity.

      If you talk with an Englishman, he’ll tell you classical liberalism is encoded in his DNA. And if the result is that he’s enslaved by Jews, then he’ll tell you he was born to be a slave.

      I for one stand with the Catholics: The English-descended in the US are not destined for slavery!

        • I like their political ideas, not the Catholicism.

          Protestant classical liberalism is a slave ideology. It destines one for slavery in modern society.

          1965 was a disaster, but the US fell from a position of great strength. No one invaded us. It’s been a catastrophic failure of classical liberalism. Dumbest political ideas ever.

        • What do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, US, and the UK all have in common?

          We’re all post-British societies that willfully flooded non-Brits in to replace us. No one forced our hand. It’s pathetic.

          Big business and big government both hate our societies, wish nothing more than to destroy us. Nick Griffin is now looking to flee to Hungary, though they’ve blocked him. He’s one of the few Brits with any sense, and he’s fleeing.

          From all of these polities we hear others blamed, but these were British societies. No one invaded. No one forced open the borders. Brits everyone fell on their swords, begged to die.

          You could add Rhodesia and SA to the list as well, also others. Brits everywhere, begging to be extinguished.

          I wish for Brits to survive. Clearly our political traditions are trash.

          • A pagan was someone who worshipped non-Christian or pre-Christian deities and lived in the country. At first, you see, most Christians lived in the cities of the ancient world; the people living in rural areas had yet to be forced into converting.

            Are you trying to annoy me on purpose?

          • @ Sprahn you seem to propagate the corrupt liberal enlightenment myth that Christianity is just about worshipping one random God I.e a random superhuman being like Odin . That’s a gross metaphysical error . Christianity is based on the philosophy of monotheism which states the universe and all life residing in it has an absolute omnipotent , omniscient , omnipresent Creator who is responsibly for all of creation and it’s maintenance . This entity is above all laws of physics , space and time unlike Zeus and Odin who rely on physical force . Moreover no pagan was forced. They accepted the philosophy on their own accord . You cannot force anyone to accept a monotheistic philosophy unless their mind and spirit accepts it . The pagans who were slaughtered by Charlemagne attacked innocent Christian civilians and gene were rightfully pulverized . Saying they were converted by force is another liberal atheist myth .

      • It seems like the good aspects of the English political tradition were simply outcompeted by the bad aspects

        The South being a partial exception but only partial.

        WASPs in the North already suffered ethnic replacement to a significant degree due to their own idiotic ideas…. but the ideas lived on.

        This is why the Alt-Right involves a lot of people LARPING as something other than Americans.

        • If Brits/Americans were more flexible, approached politics more as a science and less as a religion, then that might not happen.

          Some seem to believe capitalism is Christianity, that it’s the natural system from the true faith.

          The secular Brits really do embrace it as the result of their blood. They say their blood commands them to be “free”. It’s all very ridiculous.

          Then you have the Catholics who like Aristotle, St. Thomas, Thucydides, Livy, and even Machiavelli, as well as Belloc, Burke, Kirk, others. (Plus Reformed Christians like Weaver).

          What does Aristotle teach? He approaches politics as a science. The Greeks warned: “Nothing in excess!” That’s very good for political science.

          I like that notion of flexibility. If a problem arises, it should be fixed. I do not like the modern Anglo approach of going out with a mighty boom (this is the Anglo Way, live or die).

          And if you ask an Englishman what he likes about England, he’ll tell you that England once ruled over vast India. So, what he really likes is India… Little Englanders like GK Chesterton who were content with mere England though I’m supposed to believe are Papists in a conspiracy. AK Chesterton had some good comments, was certainly not a Little Englander, but he also wasn’t a political fanatic.

          • “If Brits/Americans were more flexible, approached politics more as a science and less as a religion, then that might not happen.”

            “What does Aristotle teach? He approaches politics as a science. The Greeks warned: “Nothing in excess!” That’s very good for political science.”

            It’s hard to argue with this.

  2. In Sum, if you are Vox Day’s friend, you are part of the real alt-right including Milo who even says he is not but only alt-lite, and if you are not Vox Day’s friend, you are fake right.

    Left and right, Red and Blue, these are mere labels, so the debate was flawed on that basis from the beginning – Just as the proposition nationalists have trouble defining the actual proposition, those who want to use left and right need to do so too. “Conservatives” once were traditional, like Chesterton. Now they are globalists. “Liberal” once meant what “Libertarian” does today.

    As to National Socialism, if you have a group of people with a Puritan ethic on thrift and work, they will ostracize and hound anyone who tries to be a moocher. The latter was why churches could be socialistic, they didn’t have to serve everyone who asked, and would do tight rules based on the limited voluntary contributions. Moochers who can vote benefits will.

    I still don’t think the alt-right is really definable. The closest I can come are those actively working on doing something to restore America to its former greatness in family and culture, not the neocon empire.

  3. Lulz, OT but the Arkansas Flu Dealer AKA Mrs. Side-O-Beef blames Bernie and his Gibsmedat Xirs not endorsing her immediately after she screwed him out of the primaries, for her loss. That hag needs to get sick and die already.

  4. Since the days of free media productions, I’ve stressed the idea that the two dimensional spectrum doesn’t get it. Politics is at least 3 dimensional, it’s likely even more than that. The Democratic Party has nothing to do with Communism and the Republican Party has nothing to do with Italian Fascism or Nazism.

    Left vs Right are just terms you use when you don’t want to write a long post. It’s really true that conservative, liberal, fascist, nazi, marxist, maoist, leninist – all those things mean different things and there is no two dimensional arrangement. Even if liberals and leftists both desire equality, it’s not the same. Some desire more of a full employment and safety net where others want to take jobs away from Whites.

  5. Slavery, Debt or the Jackboot…it’s the dark triad of politics.

    Communism, Liberal-Democracy or Fascism…

  6. Comparisons between the alt-right/alt-lite and 18th / 19th century British parliamentary politics are specious, to say the least. I certainly don’t see any Gladstone or Pitt the Younger emerging from the current Vox – Anglin controversy. A more apt comparison might be between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, or Jacobins and Girondins….

    Now, regarding this Jack Ryan business….Pray, what manner of faggotry is this?

    • Here’s what happened, Spahn: Denise and I called out Jack Ryan for being an insufferable coward after he deleted our comments “were they really (((Muslims?)))” and “never forget the Israeli art students.” I also asked him to, please, stop being a race-mixing faggot and understand that Jews did 9/11.

      Unable to handle the truth, he deleted all of our comments and locked the thread. Lulz!

      • Neither you nor madam posted anything that was the least bit objectionable. I certainly hope the admin of this forum does not countenance such loutish behavior on the part of their contributing writers????

        • Our good brother Jack mentioned in the post that the comment section would rather be used to pay respect to the fallen rather than yelling ” KIIIIIIIKKKKKEEESS did it ”which is obvious. And everyone under the sun knows Mossad masterminded the operation.

      • I think Jack like any other right wing red blooded straight white man gets irritated and pissed off when someone flings verbal excrement and babbles incoherently . Instead of doing cheap shot tactics like calling a man paying respect to other fallen white compatriots a ” race mixing faggot ” like an adolescent nigger learn to be more respectful .

    • “…Jack always calls out the Jew…”

      No he doesn’t. If you say a world about 9-11 that wasn’t in the government report he deletes it as he deleted my post which were all on actual physical facts. Like that Trump, who Jack said would never say evil conspiratorial things, said that there were bombs in the building. Also how building 7 fell the same speed as a rock dropped in air. These are facts. You can draw whatever conclusion you want form them but they are facts.

      I think that the banning of sites for different reasons is not the real reason they are banning them. I think they’re testing and if they get away with it they will take down anything related to 9-11 and especially building 7. They want to censor the internet.

      • Jack has written extensively about kike scum on this website . He has several articles regarding Jewish infiltration and corruption . I think he just wants to keep stuff clean while commemorating the fallen white soldiers and good gentlemen.

  7. A Mike Cernovitch T-shirt, with Cernovitch’s image made to resemble the famous Alberto Korda photo of “Che” Guevara? You couldn’t pay me enough to wear such an absurd garment!

  8. This is an excellent post, but we can take ideas from different groups/times without embracing every component.

    Distributists generally reject the welfare state. So, my thinking was we’d ideally entice foreign investment capital (the opposite of Venezuela), and also encourage locals to save so that they might one day own capital also. A consumption tax might help in this effort.

    Capitalists talk of competition, but they’re always seeking monopoly. So, attempts could be made to prevent such concentration or else to regulate like a utility. Wealth overconcentration is clearly dangerous to a polity, so the death tax or another means could be used to thwart it.

    We could start off with a fairly capitalist system and then chip away at the parts that don’t work. If we want small downtown areas, then maybe don’t tax them at all.

    The assumption today tends to be that one must embrace one extreme or another. And that seems ridiculous. Capitalism is very efficient, when first growing anyway. Socialism is generally inefficient. We can learn from both, learn from other movements and their attempts.

    Asian polities have been very successful. We can certainly look at what works for them.

    A major weakness of Protestant capitalism is how we’re left vulnerable to Hollywood, MTV, Nickelodeon, Disney. So, we could aim to build local authorities which can help protect local communities.

    Decentralisation is the key. Usually all systems moderns consider are centralised. (Capitalism, socialism, fascism, whatever). They don’t want decentralisation and small community to even be an option.

    Aristotle taught that all components of a state should be functional, should fit together. Confucius makes a similar comment that ministers should be ministers etc. So, each component should be functional, but we also need human communities. Efficiency and power need to be balanced with community and checks on power.

    Also, capitalism tends to be very fragile. So, we could work greater redundancy into the system where such seems prudent. Just in time inventory systems work very well, until something breaks.

    Another problem is how successful societies tend to grow apathetic and ultimately corrupt. We need to ensure prosperity doesn’t spoil us.

    We could aim to expand by buying land from the dying US. Its primary export could become selling unused land to us. And we could filter immigrants to accept whom we wish, no need to reject anyone. If Singapore, S. Korea, and Japan can build themselves up from nothing, then surely we could as well.

    And before the ethnostate is legally achieved, we can focus on raising children as best we can in the current system.

    • One thing I’ve noticed in the AltRight: Some want a more decadent lifestyle. Some want an almost Puritan lifestyle.

      Well, both are possible with decentralisation.

      This also solves Reformation vs. Catholic vs. East Orthodox divide. All 3 could be welcomed, in their own cantons. And some cantons could be secular, etc. Anything’s possible with decentralisation. One canton could even pursue Roman degeneracy, build public baths (as some seem to want). Why not? I wouldn’t live there, but people are different.

      A truly Christian society should understand that man is fallen, not demand utopia. At best one can rope off areas, pursue the good life in those.

      Amerindians manage prohibition very well on some small reservations. But there’s always a liquor store just outside the boundary. That’s fine. Advertising is corrupting. So, it might should be removed from parts of society.

      • How I long for the decadent lifestyle of a National Socialist libertine! I would put Caligula and Nero to shame.

        Capitalism should not be confused with free enterprise, which is what I think you are doing. The former is nothing but the tyranny of international jewish finance, while the latter promotes healthy economic competition and rewards individual initiative, you dig?

        Socialism is not incompatible with free enterprise and is a very efficient system of government, as long as the society to be governed remains homogeneous (i.e., WHITE) in nature.

        • I had Greg Johnson in mind when I wrote that, hahaha.

          But yea, I reject finance-capitalism. I’ll try to post later Belloc’s definition of “capitalism” (from his “Servile State” book).

  9. Buckley planted his flag on the right-most possible position that could win, then proceeded to win.

    He purged everyone to his his right because they were a threat to victory, and were often insane. Sound familiar?

    We need a new Buckley.

  10. Buckley planted his flag on the right-most possible position that could win, then proceeded to win.

    Proceeded to win? Are you insane?

  11. What system we have is less important than emancipating WHITES from Jewish rule. There is no single perfect system. The basics are respect for property rights, freedom of conract, freedom of association, due process and freedom of speech/assembly/religion.

    Whites are intelligent enough and flexible enough to flourish under any nummber of different systems if we are Jew free.

    Jewish control of the banking and money system distorts almost every other aspect of society. They can create booms, busts prosperity or stagnation at their will. This is a central problem from which many other problems arise.

    Also, multi-racialism is the embodiment of chaos and domestic instability. In racially homogeneous societies there are fewer conflicts because there are fewer conflicts of interest.

    In summary, I think there’s too much focus on whether this system or that one is best. That’s not the problem. There are two issues: (1) Pro-White and (2) Anti- Jew.

    In the 19th century when pioneers flooded into new areas, WHITES self regulated and self organized and formed viable communities and economic relations in the tumultuous intervals between the wild frontier and formal civic institutions, cities, statehood and incorporation into the union.

    DeToqueville and other observers have commented on the amazing capacity of WHITE Americans for self organizing and self regulation.

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