This was actually the precursor to the Alt Left. I started this ill-fated movement in 2009, seven years ago. I must say it was a complete flop. Virtually nobody signed on. And the few who called themselves Liberal Race Realists on here generally spent all their time engaging in the worst racist abuse and race-baiting of each other. Disgusting.
LRR ran into all of the same problems that the Alt Left is running into except more so. The Race Realist Alt Left and the Left Wing of the Alt Right are both running into the same problems that LRR ran into. A good part of the Alt Left is already chucking the race realist part, which was actually one of the founding tenets of the Alt Left, but whatever.
If people want to make some Alt Left minus the race realist part, I could really care less. There’s nothing really to be gained for the Left in talking about race realism anyway. There’s nothing to be done about it, and all talking about it does is create more rightwingers and turn more liberals rightwing. What’s the point? Why feed the enemy and starve ourselves? Are we masochists? Are we bent on losing as part of some “beautiful loser” Romanticism? I can see why a lot of the Alt Left wants to chuck the race realist part. It stands to tar our movement, which is already going to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., with the racist moniker in a bad way by painting a target right on our heads and calling it “Racist – Come Hit Me Please.”
At some point, I said that LRR had flopped and I folded it up, only to turn it much more expansively into the Alt Left later on. The Alt Left has a Helluva lot more potential than LRR did, and let’s hope it grows!
What was LRR all about? The best definitions of it so far is from Hunter Wallace, the fine writer of Occidental Dissent:
A dash of race realism, positive White racial identity, the Leftist view of American history, anti-racism, and a base of liberalism.
Well, that is exactly what it was. And that is probably not a bad definition of my version of the Alt Left too. I could not write a more perfect summation.
More Wallace, summing up the problems inherent in the movement and predicting, accurately, that the movement would go nowhere, which is exactly where it went:
Robert Lindsay is still trying to bake his political cake out of incompatible ingredients: a dash of race realism, positive white racial identity, the leftist view of American history, anti-racism, and a base of liberalism. Needless to say, this unusual combination is almost never found on sale. His brand of race realism rules out about “95% of the pro-White crowd.” It’s probably more than that, really.
Which is odd. Lindsay has attracted many racialist readers (myself included) with his incisive observations. His blog entries have been featured on Amren. He is very fascinated with the pro-White scene and writes about it quite regularly. We agree on many points and matters of fact but tend to draw different conclusions. I don’t sense any duplicity in his writings that wafts off the likes of Lawrence Auster (Jew) or Ian Jobling.
In this post, Lindsay again talks about his anecdotal experience with the liberal stratum of White Californians and reiterates his often-stated view that White Nationalism is simply impossible in America. I don’t believe his sweeping conclusions are warranted by the sample size he is using.
Here in the South, I find most people around my age to be either “casual racists” or otherwise receptive to racialism. These people have never heard of White Nationalism. They tend to be uninterested in politics. Most are thinly Protestant Christians (rarely attend church). None are haunted by any sense of guilt over the Holocaust, Jim Crow, slavery, extermination of the Indians, oppression of women, etc. Most hold at least negative views about Negroes, illegal immigration, and affirmative action.
There is no organization on the ground trying to recruit them to White Nationalism. Instead, the movement is bottled up in cyberspace. Perhaps it will remain there indefinitely. Maybe that will change.
I would wager that White Nationalism has a better chance of breaking out into the mainstream (in the South) than Lindsay’s version of race realism. These days liberalism and racialism are mutually exclusive. Racialists don’t have much use for the Left and tend to jettison its neurotic obsessions with racism, feminism, homophobia, political correctness, all its talk about “freedom” and “equality,” and so on. Liberals don’t have any use for White racial consciousness (except in the negative sense), immigration restriction, opposition to affirmative action and multiculturalism, or any of ideas that animate White Nationalists.
After 1965, there is no longer any middle ground between the two. Whether it be neocon race realism (Jobling) or Liberal Race Realism (Lindsay), I don’t see much of an audience for a third way.
And here:
Robert Lindsay, the most interesting liberal in cyberspace, has done two interviews with Voice of Reason. He used to be a regular commentator on OD in 2009.
Lindsay is notable for his attempt to integrate communism, anti-racism, race realism, and White Advocacy. He is a critic of Zionist Jews and White Nationalism. His rhetorical scatter shot hits targets on both the Right and Left.
LRR remains in part of the Alt Left – for the most part in the Left Wing of the Alt Left. I was thinking that Rabbit’s movement was sort of the stepchild of LRR. In fact, Rabbit is LRR with some modifications, but he’s taking it a lot further than I did. Indeed, Rabbit has said that he read my site for many years while I was writing pre-Alt Left stuff, and he links back to a report of an early interview with me that was discussed on Occidental Dissent.
But people might want to read about LRR to see a movement that laid the groundwork for the Alt Left and was in fact the Alt Left in its initial limited manifestation. So LRR is interesting for historical reasons if for no other.
Liberal Race Realism Starting to Grow
Liberal Race Realism: The Facts and the Project
Liberal Race Realism Trashed on Craigslist
Liberal Race Realism: Clearing Up a Few Things
Liberal Race Realism: Where We Are Coming From
Excellent New Piece on Liberal Race Realism
Liberal Race Realism – A Brief Definition
In Defense of Liberal Race Realism
