Greg Johnson's Strategy: Influence and Insinuate Existing Elites
I posted this as a reply to Alex's VNN article on Buchanan, but it never appeared, so I am posting it here.

I always love it when Alex writes an essay. I don’t have time to sift through the discussion forum looking for his little gems. That said, I strongly disagree with his attitude here.

Pat Buchanan will not save us. Nor will Ron Paul. Nor will any politician. Nor will we be saved by race realist policy wonkery. I see no salvation for our race short of creating a new political system, either by replacing the US system as a whole or by seceding from it.

But Buchanan the writer and commentator has his virtues and his uses.

1. Linder constructs his argument about strategy in terms of crafting a message that gets to dim ordinary people. I am not sure that is the right audience. Historically speaking, dim masses don’t count for much, because they are easily controlled by elites with access to political power and the power to shape attitudes through education, religion, and the press. How would Linder’s strategy change if white nationalists focused on changing white elite opinion?

2. The white elites in the US are not dim. If dim is the average, the elites are above dim. Some of them are fiendishly intelligent. The white elites in the US can, however, be characterized by high degrees of individualism, conformism (the two actually go hand in hand), materialism, and insecurity about their status. The richer they are, the more insecure they are, because the more they have to lose.

3. They can lose status, of course, because in the US, status depends more on achievement than birth. In more traditional societies, one has status through birth, whether one is a street sweeper or an aristocrat. Here, one’s status is “earned.”

4. Now, in both kinds of society, it is other people who “grant” one’s status. If nobody will treat an aristocrat like an aristocrat, then he has no status. But for whatever reason, in a country like England, an aristocrat like Sir Oswald Mosley might take very radical political positions, and even go to jail for them, but enough people still recognized him as an aristocrat that his social standing was never destroyed. In the US, we are much more individualistic. We grant or withhold status based on what each person does or says, not who his parents were.

5. At first glance, that seems like a great system. There are certainly fewer barriers to upward mobility. In the United States, money buys anything.

6. Unfortunately, money also guarantees nothing. Thus the people who fight hard for upward social mobility are also haunted by downward mobility. They know that the very individualism that allowed them to rise also allows them to fall back. For if their business partners, social contacts, and others turn their backs on them, they can easily be ruined, and whether this happens is merely a matter of individual choice, based upon nothing more stable than calculations of self-interest.

7. Tocqueville long ago observed that American individualism goes hand in hand with a high degree of social conformity. Why is this? Here is my theory: human beings are social animals, with a need for social approval and recognition. In individualist societies, however, the extension of social approval and recognition is highly conditional and constantly re-evaluated. Therefore, one has to be more attentive to gauging and conforming to public opinion in individualistic societies. Thus a high degree of individualism and social mobility promotes a high degree of social conformism, because people also value social approval and social stability. (The ambitious love upward mobility, but once they get theirs, they want to hold onto it.)

8. This is why social mobility in individualist societies is most available to people who combine intelligence and ambition with a shallow, extraverted, conformist personality type. Frat boys with MBAs.

9. Furthermore, the more ambitious one is, the more one needs social approval and recognition, because one needs to secure the cooperation of more people to do bigger things. Thus as one approaches the pinnacles of the white money and power elites, one finds individuals who have higher and higher levels of ambition, aggressiveness, narrow cunning intelligence, extroversion, social conformism, and a pathetic, childlike insecurity.

10. No sane society should be ruled by people like this. But we were far better off when we controlled our own “symbolic realm” — the realm of ideas, ideals, honors, and opinion that governs the granting and withholding of social status.

11. Unfortunately, that realm has now been captured by an alien, hostile elite, the Jews, who have rigged a new status system to reward whites who betray their own kind and promote and engage in race-destructive behavior. The segment of society most controlled by this hostile elite is the entertainment industry, which is thus on the cutting edge of race destructive white behavior. Whites in Hollywood attain status through anti-natalism, feminism, homosexuality, miscegenation, adopting non-white babies, and the like. Where Hollywood goes, there goes America, if the Jews who are scripting our dispossession and extinction have their way.

12. The strategic question of White Nationalism, therefore, is: How do White Nationalists change elite opinion when our plutocrats tend to be shallow, extroverted, and insecure about their status, which happens to be determined by our polar opposites, the Jews?

13. The problem is compounded when White Nationalists themselves aspire to attain or hold onto elite status. Aside from the personal benefits of such status to White Nationalists, such status is also beneficial to the movement, since elite members have greater access to the elite.

14. I believe that this is the context in which one has to understand the strategies of such people as Samuel Francis, Patrick Buchanan, and Jared Taylor. If I wanted to (a) promote white nationalism to status-conscious, insecure elites, and (b) maintain my own status and thus access to these elites, I would give a wide berth to the Jewish Question, since the Jews now control the status system in our society, and if they felt sufficiently threatened by people like Francis, Buchanan, et al., they would shut them down and destroy any access they might have to their preferred audience.

15. If I were Francis, Buchanan, etc., I imagine I would play the following dangerous game with the Jews. Because they would work to shut down and marginalize anyone who was openly impervious to the Jews, one would have to signal a certain porousness to them, specifically by cooperating with whatever marginal Jews will associate with White Nationalism, e.g., Michael Hart, Michael Levin, Marcus Epstein, Paul Gottfried, etc. These Jews obviously think they are getting something by cooperating with White Nationalists, if only the chance to spy on our gatherings.

16. But we have to give White Nationalists some credit too, for they might think they are using these Jews to advance White Nationalism. Maybe they are foolish or naive to think this, but that is probably what they think.

17. If Francis et al. were merely working as fronts for the Jews, in order to mislead and sabotage White Nationalism, then why would they have any public affiliation with Jews? Wouldn’t that blow their cover? Wouldn’t that make their task more difficult?

18. The mere fact that at people like Buchanan, Francis, and Taylor interact in a collegial fashion with certain marginal Jews does not constitute evidence that they are working for the Jews. It does not follow simply as a matter of logic. In fact, it would make more sense for them not to associate with Jews.

19. It is certainly reasonable and prudent to be suspicious of the judgment of White Nationalists who think they can manipulate Jewish opinion to advance our cause. It is certainly reasonable to be cautious in dealing with such people. But suspicion is not proof, and using such people cautiously does not mean that they cannot be used at all.

20. As an introvert, I have little patience for extroverts, and highly extroverted, status-insecure elite members like George W. Bush strike me as especially soulless and contemptible. Frankly, I wish we could save our race without dealing with such people. In my darker moods, I wonder if a race that allows itself to be led by people who put trivial issues of personal status ahead of collective survival can be saved, or even if it deserves to be saved. There is something disgusting about people who have all the money in the world and permit themselves less freedom to speak their minds than a truck driver or short order cook. As N. B. Forrest once asked on VNN about Mel Gibson: How much money does one need to give the Jews the finger? I wish I could shame these people, but I cannot, for their sense of shame is held captive by our enemies. Thus I have little patience for efforts to soft sell these people on their own race’s survival. What kind of people need to be soft-sold their own survival?

21. That said, Pat Buchanan has his uses. I recommend his books to skittish, insecure, status-conscious mainstream conservatives to nudge them in the right direction. If they like Buchanan and become comfortable advocating his take on the world, then perhaps they can be brought further still, by reading Sam Francis’ Essential Writings on Race, then American Renaissance, then maybe Kevin MacDonald.

22. Even if Alex’s worst suspicions about Buchanan are true, that would in no way lessen the value of his books. Even if the Jews are using him to mislead, we can still use him to wean people away from mainstream Republicanism in the direction of White Nationalism. To think that such attempts would be doomed to failure is to underestimate our own power and to ascribe to the Jews some sort of occult force of invincibility that they simply do not have. That is how losers think.

23. I do not think Pat Buchanan is our competitor. I do not think he is our enemy. And even if he were, we are strong and clever enough to use him for our own ends.

An afterthought: The depressing truth I am struggling to come to grips with is that our race must be saved IN SPITE OF ITSELF, and AGAINST ITS WILL. No healthy organism needs to be provided with a moral justification for its survival. But white people do. From a biological point of view, this is morbid and decadent. But since we are not in a position to simply remove this weakness, we have to deal with it. That is the most important strategic question.