Centrists need to talk about anti-whiteness.

there's a middle ground here.

In Jonathan Rauch’s article for the UnPopulist, he reviews the last six decades of attacks on liberalism, and how not much has changed. Consider the title of the book he cites: “The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point.” Sounds like a book published in 2026. But it was actually published in 1970. So, has American culture really been so lonely that it has stood “at the breaking point” for 56 straight years?

If you go back to the Christian revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries, you would find similar catastrophic predictions. “The church is disintegrating... At the breaking point... We need a spiritual revival to save us from hell...”

You still hear this rhetoric in churches. They talk about abortion as a sin which cries out to heaven, and claim that if America doesn’t return to Christ, we are all doomed. That hasn’t disappeared. What is new is this “secularization” of doom and gloom.

Instead of telling people to return to Christ, secular doomers ask us to return to a “vague sense of community.” Often they are informed by Marxism, and propose that economic reforms could deliver this “community” to our doorstep, since we are all so helpless and cannot obtain it on our own.

the fascist solution to low social cohesion

Or there is the fascist version, of “social cohesion,” which replaces economic reform with racial reform. America is too non-white, and by deporting Indians, Chinese, and Mexicans, liberals and conservatives will learn to love each other once again.

Alternatively, deporting the non-whites is just a prelude to something much more radical, which is mass disenfranchisement, the destruction of democracy, and the rise of the Trumpenreich.

Even Jimmy Carter affirmed the idea of a “secular decline,” in his 1975 speech:

“[a] crisis of confidence ... strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”

And yet, just five years later, America would come roaring back with the 1980s. What changed? The economy got better, and foreign policy became more aggressive. No “spiritual awakening.” No “return to Christ.”

Rather than viewing the “malaise of capitalism” as a linear worsening, it should be seen as a cyclical forgetfulness. When conservatives pine for Reagan, or leftists pine for the unionism of the 1960s, they are forgetting what came before.

Rauch calls out the opponents of liberal capitalism as:

“postliberals, post-modernists, radical feminists, queer theorists, National Conservatives, Christian nationalists, Catholic integralists, intersectionalists, techno-monarchists, aristopopulists, and out-and-out Fascists.”

Rauch’s list is not entirely fair, although it’s always satisfying to hear “both sides” critiqued.

Post-modernists? Really? The biggest threat to liberal democracy is Jackson Pollock or whatever people are calling post-modernism? No, the threat is not bad art or architecture -- although Tucker Carlson will claim that this is an existential threat, most people don’t care. Most people don’t live next to a big blob of a misshapen building -- most Americans live in a rural single family homes, or in suburbs, or in a Soviet-style apartment, or in a skyscraper. Post-modern architecture and art is actually quite rare and fleeting in the view of the average American.

I suppose there’s some “post-modern politics” going on with the alt-right, with gas chamber memes? But George Lincoln Rockwell was memeing back in the 1960s -- I don’t see why “post-modern” is the correct term here.

Is it the irony? Are we too ironic, and this is ripping society apart? This sort of reminds me of the AI bubble: everyone criticizes irony, just as everyone denounces AI. Irony is not the biggest threat to liberal democracy either.

Radical feminists? What is the charge? What exactly have radical feminists done, or what are they doing, that is so threatening? As far as I know, the main preoccupation of radical feminists is to support abortion, and rights for gay or trans people. They hand out condoms at universities, and talk about being sex positive, and write blogs about girlhood and performing and bedrotting. What’s the threat? Rauch makes it sound as if radical feminists are setting off car bombs and calling for an end to democracy.

Again, queer theorists? Are trans people the threat to liberal democracy? Sure, some trans people are communists, but if the problem is communism, just name it: communism. As far as I know, the one elected trans representative in federal government right now is a liberal democrat, not a radical communist. I don’t see why queer theory is threatening to liberal democracy, unless you’re to forward the conservative position that our foundation is found in family values. Maybe, but you’d need to make a positive argument to convince me.

Besides those three mishaps, we can attack some people on the left: Hasan Piker, who praises Hamas and China, does not do so as a “queer theorist” or a “post-modernist” or as a “radical feminist,” but as a Marxist-socialist. Why not attack these people directly for what they are? It’s anti-colonialism, anti-white, anti-capitalism.

But if we clearly call out communism as an enemy of liberal democracy, and its associated cultural offshoots, we might come dangerously close to validating some “fascist” opinions. Maybe it’s easier to talk about sexism, queer theory, and “post-modernism,” because those ideas are so soft and fuzzy that opposing them avoids touching more sensitive racial issues.

Luigi Mangione is not a queer theorist, radical feminist, or post-modernist. He represents a classic Marxist hatred of the rich -- even if his personal views are convoluted, that is how his assassination was perceived.

The enemies here aren’t gay people, women, or “post-modernists” -- the enemies are anti-elitist, anti-white, anti-American extremists. These extremists then feed into another crop of extremists, the white nationalists, who hide behind a veneer of Christianity. But there is significant cross over between the two groups, in a figure like Alexander Dugin. Dugin praises both the anti-white, anti-colonial ideology of the left, while fusing this with the traditionalism and xenophobia of the right.

This is the problem of Rauch’s analysis. He refuses to name race as a central point of contention. If we cannot identify the problem, we cannot ascertain a solution.

I want to make it clear that “positive white identity” is not the solution to our problems. Elon Musk is constantly posting about white genocide now, which is ridiculous and unhelpful. But liberal democracy is threatened by the state-approved ideology of anti-whiteness.

If you remove race from the equation, the right-wing falls apart. On its own, Christianity, conservatism, traditionalism, and other backwards looking forces are too weak to challenge liberal hegemony. However, with race as the true inner core of the right-wing, all of these “excuses” can be used as shibboleths. None of them are motivating in themselves, but talking about “heritage Americans” and “traditional America” is a dog-whistle for white people.

The solution isn’t a mass deportation of non-whites, but a mass cancellation of anti-whites. People who use anti-white rhetoric have no place in public life. Specifically: scapegoating white people for the failures of non-whites. If you tell white men that they are at fault for crime, disorder, illiteracy, poverty, and chaos, eventually they will come to see liberalism as a game they cannot win.

The most dynamic and ideological right-wingers don’t really have any strong attachment to Christianity, or family values, or anti-LGBTQ ideology. What they are truly motivated by is a desire to protect themselves from a leftist onslaught of anti-whiteness. Things like abortion, gay rights, and Christianity become “polite proxies” in a war of identity.

Elon understands this, which is why he skips most of the stuff about Christianity and gay people and goes straight for white genocide. (There’s some stuff about transgenderism too, to be fair.)

It’s a simple formula: if you support white genocide, you’re on the left; if you oppose it, you’re on the right.

The problem for me is that “white genocide” is a physicalization of an ideological problem. I truly do not care if white people become a minority in America -- that’s already been achieved in LA and Miami, and it’s totally fine. I don’t care. What I care about is the spiritual and psychological dimension, where white people are made to feel guilty and grovel on the basis of race.

I am “deep left” because I am in favor of globalism. I want open borders, free trade, and international diplomacy. I want global protections for minorities, whether they are Tutsi in Rwanda, or Chinese in Indonesia, or Jews in Germany. I want people to have the biological freedom to do as they please with their bodies, and to make reproductive decisions without the intervention of the state. I do not want a return of Christianity, or fascism, or nationalism.

What happened in Israel and Ukraine are tragic examples of blood-and-soil nationalism gone wild, in the absence of a strong international system. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the sanctions were pathetic. The Russians routed oil through India, and no secondary sanctions were imposed. Russian frozen assets were not utilized.

In Israel, the lack of a diplomatic solution is a decades-long problem, a refusal of both sides to budge or compromise. The solution, if there is to be one, is for Israel to cooperate with a coalition of Arab countries to provide Gaza with security and prosperity. I am opposed to the “multi-polar” vision of neo-isolationists, who want to sit back and watch as conflicts erupt all over the world.

If what I am describing does not sound sufficiently leftist to you, call it “neo-liberalism internationalist libertarianism” or something. I’m not here to debate semantics. I’m trying to get at the heart of the issue, which is that right-wing rage is largely a product of leftist scapegoating. If the left (or center) wants to deflate the right, it needs to not only *stop* its attacks on white men, but it actually needs to *stand up* and *defend* white men when they are blamed for all the evils of the world.

Anyone who uses the term “white man” as a pejorative is the problem, because these are the people driving the rise of white nationalism. They are the root of the extremism of the present moment.

The reason why white nationalism is on the rise isn’t because white people see Mexicans at Home Depot, or because they go to college with Chinese foreign students, or because their doctor is Indian. It’s not the visibility of non-white people that generates a right-wing reaction. It’s the constant hectoring, name-calling, blaming, shaming, and guilting tactics employed by the most extreme fringes of the left, which, with the BLM movement, came to overshadow the sensible center.

The solution is a mass cancellation. It has to come from the top-down. News organizations need to fire reporters; social media platforms like Twitch need to ban streamers; school curricula needs to be rewritten. Anti-white voices need to be shut down and excluded from polite society. We have to stop blaming white men for everything evil in the world.

This is the difference between “wokeness” and liberalism, or even “wokeness” and unionism. It’s the hatred of white men. If you can’t call it out, you can’t solve the problem.