A few weeks back, I wrote a blog post featuring a Princeton study that found that race riots make America more conservative. Examining elections since the 1960s, the study’s author observed a consistent shift towards the political right in response to racial tensions erupting into social violence. I argued in my post that given such a precedent, we could be sure that the race riots currently plaguing our nation’s urban areas were red pilling more Americans than ever.
We now appear to be seeing a manifestation of that right-wing turn. Not only are we seeing armed militias surging across the nation, but now cops are joining those militias! The far-left site The Intercept begrudgingly recognized this new bromance between right-wing militia groups and police forces. Indeed, there have been a number of articles reporting on the fact that thousands of both active and retired law enforcement officers have joined militia organizations over the last few years, and we can only imagine that their numbers have swelled in light of their betrayal by left-wing lawmakers who disavowed law enforcement with their calls to ‘defund and disband’.
The rise in right-wing militias has been going on for some time now. Back in 2017, PBS did a report highlighting a noticeable surge in armed militia activity and membership. Today, there are over 500 militia groups in the US, more than double the number in 2008. Groups such as the Three Percent Militia have chapters in virtually every single state in the nation. And organizations such as the Oath Keepers include among their membership both current and former law enforcement as well as military personnel who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What’s key here in understanding this bromance between armed militias and law enforcement is that it’s part of the continued political realignment going on in our nation, the same realignment that’s going on all over the world in response to the dying yet still dominant structures of liberal globalization. Broadly speaking, the current political realignment is what scholars call a populist realignment. The paradigm that increasingly defines our politics is no longer organized around a partisan animosity between Democrats vs. Republicans, or right vs. left, or even big government vs. small government; instead, the new political paradigm that is dominating our nation is one organized around the animosity between the people vs. the political class, a clash between the ruled vs. their rulers. What characterizes populists is a deep-seated suspicion, indeed a radical hostility towards our political and media elite, who are seen as ruling for their own benefit, for their own gain, rather than the benefit and gain of those they claim to represent. Populists are united by the notion that the customs, cultures, and traditions of a nation are best preserved when taken out of the hands of the dishonest ruling elite and placed back in the hands of ordinary citizens.
As part of this political paradigm shift, these race riots in urban centers throughout our nation are in fact politically and socially realigning our population into two different groups marked by two different regions. On the one side, you have the increasingly tribalistic ethno-nationalist wing occupying our urban areas. This of course is the pro-Black Lives Matter movement, which entails factions that want a return to segregationist conditions where people are deliberately reorganized according to their race, with blacks and non-whites in general receiving preferential treatment to counter the supposed evils of so-called ‘white privilege’ and systemic racism. Such is the vision that is playing out in many of our college campuses. In a recent a study, 42 percent of the 173 schools surveyed offered racially segregated residences, 46 percent offered segregated orientation programs, and 72 percent hosted segregated graduation ceremonies. And as college presidents are enthusiastic supporters of such tribalistic arrangements, so liberal politicians are lending their blessing on this cultural Marxist realignment of the Democrat Party.
On the other side, you have, in effect, everyone else; that is, everyone and anyone who doesn’t buy this resurgent tribalism or cultural Marxism. And this group is particularly characterized by a growing populist sentiment among white working-class voters who live in the suburbs and exurbs. This is the constituency most responsible in handing the presidential election to Donald Trump in 2016. During the primaries, Trump won more than 150 counties where at least 8 in 10 people were whites without college degrees. And then, the election itself was even more stunning: all told, in nearly 200 counties throughout the nation that voted for the Democratic candidate in every single presidential election since Walter Mondale, their constituents switched and voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Make no mistake: with our Princeton study in the backdrop, this voting base is being energized like never before because of these race riots, mobilized against the urbanized tribalisms over which our leftist political class has become the enthusiastic custodian! And as a result of this energizing, we’re seeing new coalitions forming – new populist bromances as it were – between what would have otherwise been hostile groups: in this case, armed militias and law enforcement. This new alliance may indeed be a microcosm of larger macrocosmic alliances forming all over the nation, signaling a surging populist movement that, in many respects, may be only just beginning!
