The myth of right wing populism

 

Keith Woods is an Irish Traditionalist and Third Positionist with his own YouTube channel. In the clip above, he offers a kind of "pseudo-Marxist" analysis of revolutions and civil wars. It´s almost an hour long, but Woods makes many interesting points. Nominally, the clip is a polemic against Tim Pool, the independent reporter who visited Sweden a few years back and was chased by a masked immigrant gang in Rinkeby, a supposed "no go zone" in Stockholm. Pool seems to be a "recovering liberal" who probably voted Trump in 2020. In reality, the clip isn´t really about Pool at all, but a more general critique of the Alt Right and populist right. Last year, many on the far right worried about or welcomed the supposed possibility of a civil war in the United States, triggered by the BLM riots and the contested elections, and this kind of thinking obviously had a great impact on the people who stormed the Capitol on 6 January this year. The general increase in political polarization is often mentioned as another factor in the process leading up to civil war and/or revolution. To Woods, this kind of thinking is counterproductive. It´s both adventurist and "liberal" at the same time, being based on the idea that angry people will join together as individuals, with whatever grievances each may have, and somehow change public perceptions of things, perhaps with the help of provocative in-your-face protests. However, no radical change can or will happen this way, for a wide variety of reasons. 

Real revolutions and civil wars are the result of economic hardships, immense geopolitical pressures, or structural problems such as the inability of an ancien régime to keep up with economic modernization. Above all, it´s the result of elite action. Woods has a very elite-centric perspective, in which the masses or the workers are always bystanders when powerful economic and political interest groups are fighting it out. Even the Russian revolution is an example of this, the Bolsheviks being supported by Wall Street bankers and the German secret service. A more immidiately obvious example is the American Civil War, when an industrial capitalist class fought a slavocracy, both being based on fundamentally incompatible modes of production. Even genuine populist revolutions - Woods considers China, Cuba and Iran examples of such - are really elite-driven if you look carefully. In Iran, the shah was challenged by modernizing students and middle class elements to his "left", but also by more traditionalist clergy, merchants and guilds to his "right", who believed modernization had gone too far. 

But what about the United States and, by extension, global capitalism? Woods doesn´t see any fundamental conflicts between different elite groups in contemporary American society. Quite the contrary: the system is "antifragile" and extremely good at integrating new groups into the capitalist-oligarchic system. There is no conflict between Wall Street bankers, old money families and the upstarts in Silicon Valley. The US system can even integrate foreign elites into its orbit. While this may be "bad for America", it´s good for the elite groups, both foreign and domestic. There is no contradiction between modernization and old structures. Rather, globalist capitalism is what drives modernization in the first place. 

The elites also have fundamentally the same values - Woods doesn´t say so, but I presume he means the peculiar blend of neo-liberalism and "woke" left-liberalism which characterizes the present phase of globalization. As for Trump, he was essentially a hoax. The 2020 election was a choice between a "Jeb Bush platform" (Trump) and some guy who was vice-president in 2008, in other words, business as usual as far as US politics are concerned. Most of the supposedly "polarized" and "radicalized" voters simply fell in line behind the standard "lesser evilism", anarcho-communists voting Biden (probably a reference to Noam Chomsky and Antifa), hard line populists voting Trump (despite having criticized him as a "sell out" for four years). The center is so entrenched that not even the relatively mild leftist Bernie Sanders can become the Democratic nominee!

BLM wasn´t a harbinger of a civil war or break down either, since the movement is funded by the elites, is under complete elite control, and thus could be ended at precisely the moment the elites wanted it to end. This is further proven by the fact that the local police and mayors often stood down in face of the protests and riots, obviously because they were part of the script. Even the demand to "abolish the police" isn´t really a radical anti-system demand, since it´s either not implemented at all, or if it is, simply strenghtens the federal police at the expense of the local police forces. This in turn is part and parcel of a general trend towards super-centralization in society as a whole. Nor is there an economic depression on the horizon: the stock exchange is booming, and while small and medium-sized businesses are destroyed, elite control is entrenched further up the hierarchy, while the federal government prints new money on a massive scale, without any particular inflationary strain on the economy. 

Woods wonders why the Capitol rioters on 6 January didn´t take seriously the possibility that the whole thing was a Deep State set up, since they usually portray the very same Deep State as evil and extremely influential. I think Woods *does* consider the storming of the Capitol to be a provocation, in the sense that gullible populists were fooled into a trap by some elite group using their attack as a pretext for another Patriot Act. Overall, the far right populists are simply part of "the spectacle" (a Situationist term). 

Not even a wholesale collapse will necessarily change things for the better. Some collapses are managed by powerful elite groups, and even if the collapse would happen for some external reason, the people that stands most to gain from them are budding oligarchs (think Russia under Yeltsin) who end up controlling most of the remaining post-collapse resources. Instead of a new populist utopia, we end up with a kind of "catabolic capitalism" that thrives on the conditions of collapse. 

Woods´ alternative to all of the above isn´t entirely clear from the clip, but he implies that antifragile alternative institutions and communities must be built, and that this will prove more important in the long run than another "mass movement" that tries to take on the centralized state on the basis of whatever transient discontent exists at the moment. Other clips on his channel indicate that he does believe in a collapse of modern civilization at some point in the future, perhaps due to resource depletion and overpopulation, so the alternative communities are presumably intended as a defense against that future development. Before that happens, however, we might end up with something Woods calls "neo-feudalism". How his traditional alt-community will survive the neo-feudal clutches is, alas, less clear... 

Still recommended.