Fighting Back

In today’s world just summoning up a little “optimism of the will” gets harder and harder. Reading Pat Buchanan’s recent “upbeat” piece at Vdare Glimmers of Hope for the GOP only emphasizes that relying on electing mainstream Republicans is finished as a viable solution for even the most pragmatic of conservatives.

Put starkly, the voting groups growing in numbers—Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans, folks with college degrees, the young—are all trending Democratic, while the voters most loyal to the GOP—white folks and religious conservatives—are declining as a share of the U.S. electorate. And demography is destiny…. The tide is still running strong against the GOP. But there may be one or two more White Houses in the Grand Old Party yet.

It is clear that the right – the real right – will have to adapt to being an oppositional movement; it will have to learn to be a lot more like the left in the days before it came to power. Unfortunately, there still isn’t much sign of this here in the US, unlike in Europe, where populist movements of the authentic right have been growing for years.

However, here and there there are hopeful signs. One of these is Youth for Western Civilization. The YWC promises to contend with the campus left, recruiting students who “want to work in defense of their people, culture, and traditions” in order to achieve three goals:

1. Inspire Western youth to organize on the basis of pride in their American and Western heritage, and counter radical multiculturalism on campus.

2. Counter and ultimately defeat leftism on campus by pushing the activist agenda, changing college policies in a conservative or right wing direction, and restoring a curriculum that focuses on Western history, not political correctness.

3. Create a social movement on campus where a right wing subculture — similar to the left wing subculture that currently exists — will provide a healthy alternative to a poisonous and bigoted left wing campus climate.

Already the YWC has been getting noticed, even earning a hit-piece from the SPLC (or, as Vdare calls it, the $PLC).

It is hard to say how things will go with the YWC. Politically, it still has not broken from the version of classical liberalism which passes for mainstream conservatism here in the US. Its website links to the Buckleyites of Young Americans for Freedom and it has been heavily involved with CPAC.

Further, if the YWC is going to compete with the left, on campus or off, it will need to get a lot tougher. A recent presentation by Tom Tancredo organized by the YWC at the University of North Carolina was a good case in point. Leftist demonstrators disrupted the event and succeeded in giving the school administration the excus they needed to close it down. In the videos of the event (available on YouTube) YWC organizers look helpless and completely ineffectual, hardly stirring while leftist demonstrators hold up a banner directly in front of Tancredo.

Anti-Antifa an interesting blog in its own right, commenting on the event, has this sensible advice for the YWC:

This video is nothing special, it’s nothing new. It is something that takes place on the streets, in the classrooms, and everywhere in between, here in America and Europe on a regular basis. The content of this video captures the very real, street level, Marxist styled opposition thriving in the atmosphere of today’s emotionally laden and hysterically driven anti-racist society. But more importantly, it displays the reality of “Free Speech” in America, something that many of us have become quite familiar with….

[W]hile they are not necessarily, not usually at least, working in direct conjunction with the establishment, these self proclaimed “radicals” are little more then reactionaries, upholding the ideals of the existing order by opposing anyone daring to speak against it….

This video exemplifies the need for disciplined militancy along side a strict, coherent and articulate voice of reason. Without it all groups and actions from here on out are destined for failure.