Tribalism and the Alt-Right

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3 mins read

Imagine you lived your whole life in a quiet suburb that was just far enough away from the metro area where no one bothered you. It’s full of upper middle class homes, very low crime rate and you’re generally afforded a peaceful life. You don’t notice at first, but soon your way of life is getting chipped away at. The people from neighboring towns, whom you have no quarrel with and have rarely interacted with, start trash talking your town. Sure, you can ignore it. Maybe it’s just petty jealousy and there is no advantage for you to get involved at all; let them say what they want.
As time goes on, the anger from the towns around you grows, the rhetoric gets dialed up and soon you’re being painted as evil just for living in your town. People from the other towns start coming through your town, holding demonstrations and demanding that you apologize for being a resident of that town and demanding that you give in to other demands from the towns around you. They demand payouts from businesses who face boycotts if they don’t relent. You find that you’re just not as comfortable being out in public anymore because your quiet life has been disturbed. Even so, you tell yourself that if you keep your head down, this will all blow over because there’s nothing to it and you’re not one of the bad guys. You’re not even sure who the bad guys are really supposed to be.
You’ve never had a reason to look down on the people from the towns around you. You’ve been more than content to let them leads the lives they see as most beneficial to them and you pay them no mind at all. You have no hatred or resentment, nor feelings or superiority either. But now you’re being pushed. You’re being encroached on. Your way of life is threatened by people that have no business telling you how to live your life, but they’re doing it anyway. They’ve painted you as a hater, a terrorist, and any other negative label they can pin on you. They get control of the media. They shame people relentlessly for not conforming to their way of doing things. At what point do you get fed up and start fighting back?
Welcome to identity politics in America. When your way of life and your culture comes under constant assault with no sign of relenting, you have to do something about it. You only have three choices: capitulate, fight back, or run and hide somewhere else and wait for it to catch up to you there. The rise of the Alt-Right is how we’re fighting back. We are now forced to get tribal and play identity politics. We let things get too out of hand. We disregarded the signs and we thought it would blow over but it’s only gotten worse. When you’re being told that you, as a white male, or a Christian or a Trump supporter are EVIL because of the things you hold dear, something has to give.
When crimes rates go up around a neighborhood, the neighbors band together, institute neighborhood watches and pledge to have each other’s backs in order to mitigate the problems. It’s time to get tribal! It can be hard. You have a right to your tribal identity, your customs and your culture. We’re already tribal about many things: our schools, our religion, our military service, our sports teams, our states, our employers and even our departments within the same employer. It’s very natural for us to be tribal. But as white, Christian, heterosexual males, we’re not allowed to be tribal about that (so we’re told). As soon as we claim a white identity, we’re labeled as bigots and racists even by our allies. But there are a lot of different tribal circles and we don’t really fit neatly in to any of them.
Not fitting neatly in to tribal category doesn’t mean we don’t belong at all. Imagine the Asian guy in a prison with very few Asians that has to make allies with one of the other racial gangs just for survival. He’s not one of them, but he can claim them as his tribes so long as they’re willing to have him. Identity politics has been forced on us and we can’t ignore it anymore. Look at the Facebook friend lists of black people (U.S. based). Sometimes you will not find a single white person on their list. Is that racist? No, it’s tribalism; they’re exercising their right to associate who they want to associate with and thereby declaring their tribal alliances.
No matter what you do as a white person now, you’re going to get labeled a racist, so you might as well go tribal and make sure you’ve got a group of people that are willing to stand up for you. It doesn’t mean that’s your exclusive tribe. My wife is from one of the countries south of the U.S. Most of my friends are white and my wife has been fully accepted in my tribe of friends and family. Yet, when we travel to her home country I am accepted, but it’s very tenuous with anyone outside of her immediate family, and I’m fine with that. Why? Because I represent an encroachment on their lives; I’m an outsider. In any heterogeneous country, foreigners are mistrusted; whereas in the U.S., we’ve been cowed in to accepting foreigners as being fully American just by showing up. But that tide is turning.
People that have kept their heads down and ignored the culture war are still the victims of it. You’ll be painted into a tribal identity whether you like it or not. And sure, there will be lots of cross-over between tribes but if you continue with the notion that you’re above it all, you could very well become one of the most tragic victims.

19 Comments

  1. And then what? Once we have our tribe, what’s the next step?
    I’m not being flippant, but quite serious. Identity politics, or political tribalism take your pick, is an effort to get something from the majority. For Blacks, voting in a bloc for Democrats has historically be a way to receive certain benefits. Before FDR, blacks were Republicans for the same reason. For gays and the rest of the sexually disoriented, collective political action has been a way to get laws passed or repealed and cultural changes implemented. The Irish in eastern cities voted for fellow Irish in order to put Irishmen in city positions where they could provide benefits to the Irish.
    So assuming that we tribed up and got a white President and a majority white Congress and Senate, a majority of white governors and judges, what specific political thing would we choose to implement? Is there anything in a specific “white” interest that is not also a general American one?

    • At this point, it’s entirely defensive. What will that turn in to later? I have no idea. I suspect the agenda would be quite different for different factions within the tribe.

    • In just the same way that other races vote, hire, and promote with the best interest of their own race and culture in mind, we need to do the same.

      • re: “In just the same way that other races vote, hire, and promote with the best interest of their own race and culture in mind, we need to do the same.” DS
        You are describing the reason for the success of the ((((Tribe)))).
        Dan Kurt

    • We already have the majority White Congress and Executive California which is nearly to the left of Lenin is run entirely by Whites as in the entire Federal system.
      What has to come next is an end to nearly all immigration, elimination of Cultural Marxism and after that gradual restoration of the original demographic through repatriation. 85% White or the Republic is toast
      On top of that you have to subversion proof your new society, Leftists proof it without turning it into a gulag or impoverishing it because you are hooked on Neo Liberal economics
      Problem is that actually solving problem is hard and the “rebels”, dirt people, men of the West , Legacy Americans ,3% and the like are all politically lazy. They want to toddle off to Monticello 2.0 as soon as possible instead of doing the hard work, the ugly work of rebuilding a nation.
      If you aren’t willing to be the guy who signs the new government deportation orders or hell death warrants all day and night, why bother fighting? You’ve already lost
      And as for what Donnner is suggesting,. No and hell no.
      All that is is Brazil al Norte , its the Latin American way and it will render your tribe weaker and the entirety less stable . If I wanted to go t Brazil, I’d go there
      You may not like it but the future is offensive not defensive and Legacy Americans are fighting for future for their children, grandchildren or great grandchildren and it one they may never see.

  2. “So assuming that we tribed up and got a white President and a majority white Congress and Senate, a majority of white governors and judges, what specific political thing would we choose to implement? Is there anything in a specific “white” interest that is not also a general American one?”
    Depending on how defines the core American nation, it may be impossible to make that distinction. If/as identity politics continues to gather momentum, I’d expect we’ll start to see that conflation.
    The most open expression is the way Jews routinely and publicly ask of policies and people, “is it good for the Jews?” When bad answers can get you wiped out, that isn’t surprising. I would expect that we’ll start to see a similar acid test of “is it good for white people?” Donner’s comment is one early marker.
    I can easily imagine how that acid test might apply to issues like crime, immigration, discrimination law, and many other fields. But I think a focus on policies is the wrong focus. The more significant change will be one of attitude. Tribalist politics is much, much more prepared to be combative. That orientation will have a far greater effect than any one policy you wish to discuss.
    All of this could have been avoided if the American power structure hadn’t chosen to be so viciously hateful toward white people. But the hate was easy; it was a status boost that felt good, and provided incidental material benefits to the haters. So it continued, and I think we’ve crossed the Rubicon now. We’ll see.

  3. “You’ll be painted in to a tribal identity whether you like it or not…”
    I think this is without a doubt true. Many young Whites whom have never even thought of having a “White identity” are being painted into it by our leftist enemies. The irony is the left will create exactly what they claim to oppose.

  4. Fascinating to read this piece. I agree with it and think it speaks for what a lot of people are feeling unconsciously but have not quite articulated.
    I’m surprised it took this long for whites to become tribal. I was recently reading about the school busing they used to do in the early 1970s. It boggles my mind that suburbanites let the government use their kids as pawns in some weird game of racial chess.
    One thing I keep thinking is that it’s been a half century since the Civil Rights Act and over a half century since Brown Vs. the Board of Ed. In that time, Americans have seen countless immigrant groups land on our shores and do very well. So the idea that white Americans are “prejudiced” per se has been exposed as a lie. That so-called prejudice didn’t affect Asians or Indians in such a way that they couldn’t outscore whites on tests or out-earn whites in the workplace. Why didn’t the so-called “systemic racism” keep the Korean kids in the back of the classroom, esp. when they came here knowing very little English?
    When people realize they’ve been lied to, they get angry and start to distrust those who lied to them. Hence, the modern-day hatred of most of the media. Where to turn? Inward and to their own. Great piece of writing; keep it up.

    • The suburbanites didn’t leave their children in the petri dish of Progressive Expert race mixing. Anthony Lukas’ magnum opus “Common Ground”, shows how in Boston the proles were the ones getting bussed – the white rabble and the black people were the raw material for the petri dish. Suburbanites like John Kerry and his little girls, Noam Chomsky (who moved to the burbs to avoid busing) were exempt. “Common Ground” isn’t a quick read, but it is a conversation stopper when someone starts chatting about ‘what to do with society’.

  5. It starts with being defensive in one’s personally life. I know the cliches about going on the offensive, and there is a time and place for that, but the VERY FIRST STEP all whites need to do and hear (and pass along)–like a true meme–is to START openly defending ourselves when someone of “color” says something disrespectful to us or about us. My Gen-X generation became so used to capitulating any time someone attacked us on the margins, through casual references to slavery, to our skin color, physical abilities/attributes, everything–no longer. It has to be made as uncomfortable or as provoking as using the “N word” in public. We have lived our lives being constantly attacked on the margins, slighted and disrespected in public and private conversations. EVERY WHITE needs to start challenging those off-hand comments, and if it escalates into some conflict, whites need to be prepared to lose friends and/or piss off the “other”. NO ONE should be made to feel comfortable saying things about whites that they would never say about other groups. We need to change our mindset for the generations to come.

    • Allyn71,
      As I noted in the article, we’ve been content until now just to be left alone, to ignore the rising vitrol. We’re not driving it but it’s come to the point that we must respond to it and we must respond loudly and viciously.

  6. […] Welcome to identity politics in America. When your way of life and your culture comes under constant assault with no sign of relenting, you have to do something about it. You only have three choices: capitulate, fight back, or run and hide somewhere else and wait for it to catch up to you there. The rise of the Alt-Right is how we’re fighting back. We are now forced to get tribal and play identity politics. We let things get too out of hand. We disregarded the signs and we thought it would blow over but it’s only gotten worse. When you’re being told that you, as a white male, or a Christian or a Trump supporter are EVIL because of the things you hold dear, something has to give. […]

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