Don't make "perfect" the enemy of "good"

and other cautiously-written advice for the "men outside history"

A few weeks ago, the sphere of the internet that is known as the Dissident Right, among other names, had an argument over optimism and defeatism, in light of the recent victory of libertarian firebrand Javier Milei in Argentina. Having been engaged in real-life matters, I was not able to observe this dispute from the beginning, though I am told that it started with a Raw Egg Nationalist post where he lambasted the e-right circle for its defeatism and eternal doom-mongering. This led to a round-table on Academic Agent’s Youtube channel, which was my proper introduction into the topic.

I usually don’t concern myself with disagreements in the sphere because I rarely consider them substantive, or, if I do, I rarely ever write an article on the matter, preferring a set of response stories on my Instagram account instead. However, this is one of those times were my disagreement, or attempt to steer the discourse toward a specific conclusion, will require me to write a proper article on the matter.

Raw Egg Nationalist’s criticism of the DR as having significant doom-mongering tendencies is one that I doubt anyone with any experience of the movement can dispute. As we’ve seen countless times, the moment a politician takes a single step of policy that differs ever slightly from the ideal construct in our collective minds, he is immediately discarded as a puppet from people who cheered them on 2 seconds ago for the “good policies” they had enacted prior. The solemn mourning and subsequent heartwarming joy of the British people, as they engaged in millennia-old rituals of royal burial and royal coronation last year were greeted in the online sphere by a barrage of “the king is a NGO globalist freemason of the 67th degree!” shouts. Irrespective of what one might think of the new king, one would imagine that a movement supposedly based around the “respect of ancient rites and traditions” would not so casually disregard them in the name of petty politics, and yet there we are. I think one would be hard-pressed to argue that we don’t exist in one of the gloomiest, most depressing and frankly utterly defeatist movements of the 21st century, thus far anyway.

All things considered, the online right has many reasons to have trust issues when it comes to “political saviors”, or to believe that there is no such thing (a wise move). We’ve been through an ineffectual Trump presidency, a supposedly “fascist” Italian government that has been tamer than a 2010 conservative politician and are now looking at either the same old faces that were not men enough to act as they should have when the time came (Farage in 2016, Trump at various times, Bolsonaro last year etc) or are suspiciously eyeing up the newcomers, like the aforementioned Javier of Argentina.

This is, in part, an equal but opposite reaction to the late 2020 coping over the possibility of Trump overturning the electoral results and re-establishing himself. In those days, there was an insanely optimistic faction, akin to a millenarian cult in its quasi-religious fervor, we now know as “Qanon”. These people, till the very second Biden was officially inaugurated, refused to believe that Trump could lose, they wielded their hope like it was magic, as if their collective wishes could bring about their desired outcome; if only they “believed hard enough”. Needless to say, Biden *was* inaugurated and the US has suffered the full extent of that reality. I bring this up because I want to make one thing clear, when I say that this doom-mongering is harmful for this sphere, I am not implying that the above was any better.

Now, with that out of the way, let me introduce the main arguments as to why I actually concur with Raw Egg Nationalist and believe that this sphere does have a problem with how it conceptualizes itself and how it tries to bring about its goals in practice. The main arguments I will be responding to are lifted directly from the above-mentioned Academic Agent Round-table (click the hyperlinks on this article to access it if you’d like).

Firstly, there is the argument that energizing people to support these politicians, who consistently prove themselves as falling short of our general vision, is actually very harmful to the supporters and only brings about greater retribution against the right, that would not have been possible without all this “flailing around” on our part, so to speak. Prime example of this, as explained in the live-stream, is the response to the January 6 events outside the Capitol building in the US. Similarly, the entire response brought about by Trump or Brexit, or any other such cause or individual, would not have happened, nor would we have suffered those consequences had they simply not existed in this manner. It was further suggested that people becoming disillusioned with politics is actually a good thing from our perspective.

To tackle these one by one, I would counter that people becoming less or more politically engaged is of little consequence in itself, since the people who run these “democracies” will never stop to question themselves even if only 4% percent of all voters show up to the polls. History shows that the side which abstains from elections and referenda never actually wins anything by doing so. To argue that it is good to abstain is to say that there are already better alternatives to this or that we can build them.

When pressed on this, the live-stream’s “anti-optimism” faction pointed to vague ideas of “bettering one’s community” and “helping family, friends and neighbors”. That is all fine and well, I certainly would never tell anyone to NOT involve themselves in their communities or help the people they live around and care about, but that solution has been attempted and it led us nowhere. We were all captured, at one point or another, by this idea that we could have a care-free life away from all the politics and vitriol by going to the countryside and forming parallel institutions within a smaller community. Yet this proved to be a mirage; the simple reality is that we live in the age of globalized bureaucratic totalitarianism, where no matter how far one goes, there is always a central government, an international body, a distant war or an energy/economic crisis which will chase them down relentlessly and force every last person to pay the “pound of flesh” that it feels it is owed.

In that sense, “political speedbumps”, which can offer even token resistance to such forces are sought out and appreciated for a very simple and logical reason: they buy us time. They provide the necessary room needed for us to breathe and re-group as necessary so that we can continue to fight the long battle. When Trump said: "In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you — and I'm just standing in their way", theatrics aside, this was the truth he was trying to communicate. The longer these people spend their time thrashing Trump or any wannabe Trump, the less time they have to unleash their terror against us, in the way they’ve been allowed to do so in most countries for the past decade now, if not longer.

Finally, the logic that we would not have suffered as badly, had they not been “provoked” by our “flailing about”, does not hold up. Would this space have even existed without the Trump craze of 2015-2016? Probably not, certainly not without many people who are now here because of it, myself included. Even beyond that though, is there really any doubt in anyone’s mind that a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016 would have led to anything different than what has happened under Biden? or that the record immigration rates of the UK now would have been significantly lower had Brexit never occurred? This idea is ridiculous because, taken to its extreme, it means that the only way to “win” for us is to never oppose our enemies until we’ve developed some great “master plan” and have found the perfect people to execute it. Do I need to say anything more?

It is interesting that the “anti-optimism” panel spoke of how the support of these politicians was fundamentally an “internet thing” and “parasocial” in nature, in other words irrelevant to the actual realities on the ground, while the supposed realistic option is to ignore every possible avenue for action in the present and vaguely concern ourselves with our communities until we find candidates who support us on 100% of issues and make a full-proof plan to get them into power. I suppose we should go on a quest for unicorns too, that would better than “parasocial relations” with people who actually win elections and obtain positions.

I am not arguing that we should settle for whatever a politician offers us and ask nothing more. In fact, I would argue that our values should be absolute and uncompromising, but I would also say that we need to allow the political space to slowly gravitate towards our values with time. If we snap at every person who takes a step towards our position because they didn’t take 10 steps at once, we will not succeed in anything we attempt. The final goal of where we want society and political life to end up must be static, but the people who take even minute steps towards that reality should be fostered, even if only to coax them into taking more steps. This is exactly how historically revolutionary movements “bought time” for themselves and shaped the “national discussion” in their favor, in order to then seize power, as was mentioned in the stream itself at one point.

That is a long-winded way of saying “don’t make perfect the enemy of good”, but that’s not all I wished to write here. There is a wider problem in this sphere that must be addressed because otherwise we will be having this debate every other Sunday. Most people here are nationalists, theocrats, monarchists and multiple other worldviews which espouse values almost completely alien to our current world and paradigm. While we truly can influence the future and should always attempt to steer it towards our values, I would urge us all to take a step back every once in a while and recognize how truly strange the things we consider normal and self-evident sound to the average person on the street.

Now, I can already hear the elite-theory-inspired counter-argument of “the population doesn’t matter! once we get power we’ll be able to chart any course and they’ll accept it!”. Sure, but the key phrase there is “once we get power”. Before that can ever occur, we need to be realistic about the world we live in and the concerns and values people are motivated by *in the present* rather than the perennial “past-future” mix we all have in our heads.

We need people who can gain some sort of traction among the power-players of this world, who can have a broad base of support by ordinary people merely to unmask the apparatus standing against them, who can obtain at least some levers of power, who can have donors to rely upon for consistent and reliable funding. We can make powerful allies, but these people, I guarantee you, will almost never agree with us even on 75% of things, let alone on all matters. Even if they did agree, they would still be forced to play their cards close to their chests and hide their true beliefs for the time being.

If we can truly call ourselves '“realistic”, in the way we understand the world, we will need to stop imagining some fully heterosexual utopia of 18 year old married couples, already with 5 kids, and politics based on feudal blood oaths and the transcendent will of God, coming out of thin air because we demand it be so. It’s not that these things are not desirable, it’s that this is not realistic political practice in the present, and frankly, it will never be realistic in any capacity if guys from our sphere don’t actively start participating in politics.

The online right is in the bizarre position where it imagines, willfully or not, that it is “above history”, merely because it can understand its twists and turns. We end up holding onto a sentiment not too dissimilar to those young kids who discover a piece of music that is older than them on YouTube and go to the comment section in order to write “I was born in the wrong generation!”. The times and values we hold dear in our hearts were real and they mattered. They are admittedly better than the decay and degeneration we see all around us, but let us not imagine that because we’ve discovered The Good that we can simply enforce it on our age through direct decree. Attempts to do so will only result in backlash and us looking like aliens, especially when we already lack the power and institutional backing to make much more mundane and “amenable” decisions, like cutting taxes. Nobody can transform a culture in this manner from the place we are sitting in now.

However, it’s not all lost; as outlined above, our beginning does not need to be perfect, the people we entrust now to bring us closer to our goals do not need to agree to even half the things we believe. The Roman empire that became the envy of the world did not begin with a thundering God-emperor supported by an established and authoritative church, but with the tumultuous and short-lived reign of a populist “perpetual president” in a dysfunctional democracy, where people were searching for meaning, left and right, in Greek philosophies, obscure Eastern sects and secret societies (sounds familiar!). Everything we’ve come to idolize since then has been the direct or indirect result of the rather mundane and similarly corrupt “petty politicking” of that era in Rome. I can boldly claim that our time right now could be that same moment in history for the next 2000 years, if only we recognize that we need to behave like men of our time, instead of acting like historically-detached, impatient, and petulant children.