My beef with the alt-right is nothing but pure envy.

In the UK, we’re still fighting WW2. Growing up fash must have been awful. What became the alt-right, they’ve always been the outsiders; persona non grata sneaking cum-stained pillows and socks into the wash without their mums noticing. They’re used to it.

For young leftists in the nineties and naughties, identity was inseparable from economic class. It just was; we never gave it much thought. We took so fully for granted how much we had in common with folk down the street who didn’t look like us, compared to the jowly entrenched whiteness on TV.

Then… something happened.

Circa 2008, we reached a parting of the ways. The corporatists’ greasy hand found its way into the frilly panties of our solidarity and did what capitalism does: debase, distort, defile. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing liberals that CEOs’ skin and genitals matter more than CEOs’ heads.

From branded Pride to boardroom feminism via the creepy Stepford wifery of the EU. When identity is commodified, it becomes the junkyard dog of the capitalist system. We who seek to obliterate the identity of exploited proletariat now butt heads with those to whom identity is an end in itself.

The ghosts of dead friends haunt the Left. Both the Corbyn/Blairite schism and the incoming Sanders/Biden divide are battlegrounds of a progressive movement paralysed by itself.

The alt-right never had to kill their friends: they never even had any. Did they even need them? The bare fact of their ideology was the banner which bound them in brotherhood as they incubated in dark corners of the internet.

It’s that unity which I envy and fear. Because unity works. The Right is winning. Ethnic nationalism is on the agenda, at least more than seizing the means of production is. Our public discourse is, po-faced, debating the nuance of what exactly we mean when we say ‘concentration camp.’

I’m not here to debate those policies; I’m here to say, ‘Congrats, lads. You made it!’ You kept the faith. While the Left spun the most outrageous abstractions, becoming strangers to ourselves, you decided not to make tiny fractions of the population the stars of the show.

Ordinary people, socially conservative; beneath contempt as they were to us, burdened to build their worldview around boring stuff like ‘the evidence of their own senses.’ You spoke to them and told them your secret, the hard-won secret you’d kept among yourselves throughout exile:

It’s ok to be yourself.

Imagine that. The strength and oneness the alt-right found in self-expression was a story worth telling after all, while we engaged in a mad dash to be anything other than that which we were born into.

Ah, but here comes the plot twist. Winning means doing business, doing business with those reasonable centrist liberals. They’re so reasonable, I know this because they told us so themselves… right before they turned their backs and their knives on us.

It’ll be the opportunists at first, those who smell a change in the wind. Then the rest will show up, ants at a picnic. They’ll talk – reasonably – about principles and values and family. I won’t spoil what happens next.

Meanwhile, the dialectic marches on. We who fight the long war will need new friends. Maybe we’ll take a look next door and ponder that, just maybe, the concerns of our neighbours aren’t so contemptible after all.

But to you, proud Aryan, I say most sincerely: may these reasonable centrists be as good a friend to you as they were to us. You deserve it. 

Rory Stobo is a lunatic and must be stopped! He’s a practicing occultist, a national battle rap champion, a lapsed actor, and one of the proverbial monkeys at the proverbial typewriters. He lives in England.