Against the “Marketplace of Ideas”

1,100 words

In my talk “Freedom of Speech,” I offer a strong argument that freedom of speech—even for our enemies—is necessary for a healthy society.

On the Right, it is common to speak of freedom of speech as an unregulated “marketplace of ideas.” To some extent, this is true. Ideas can be bought and sold like fish and firewood. Moreover, we want the freedom to sell our ideas, and we want the public to be free to buy them.

But the “marketplace of ideas” leaves out something crucial. Thus it is a bad model for understanding what we are doing. Indeed, accepting this model actually subverts our goals.

To understand why, we must make some distinctions.

At any given time, the public has a set of ideas and preferences. These are simply “given.” There are two basic ways to deal with “given” ideas and preferences: catering to them or improving upon them.

Catering to given ideas and preferences means giving the people what they want—or at least what they think they want. There’s nothing wrong with that, if their ideas and preferences are good enough just the way they are.

But obviously, White Nationalists don’t think that. We think our people have been programmed for self-destruction. Thus they need better ideas and preferences. Our job is to provide them.

There are other ways to draw the distinction between catering to and improving upon given ideas.

In terms of personal relationships, one can distinguish between flattery and friendship. A flatterer tells people what they want to hear, even if it is bad for them. A friend tells people what they need to hear if they are to get better.

In cultural and educational terms, one can distinguish between corruption and edification. To edify someone is to build him up: to replace bad habits with good ones, false ideas with true ones, crude tastes with refined ones. There are two forms of corruption. The most obvious form is to make people worse: to corrupt their characters, tastes, and ideas. The less obvious form of corruption is simply to make people comfortable with and complacent about their current state of imperfection.

In political terms, one can distinguish between pandering and leadership. Panderers give the people what they think they want, i.e., they conform to the people’s given ideas and preferences. Panderers may be in perfect agreement with the people, or if they are not, they hide this fact in order to gain power. Leaders, however, seek to improve the people’s ideas and preferences, not merely cater to existing ones.

Leadership in this sense is completely consistent with populism. Populism means upholding the common good of the people as the standard of political legitimacy. That’s what the people really want. However, there is often a distinction between the real common good and what people erroneously think is the common good. Panderers cater to such errors, whereas true leaders try to educate the people to understand their true interests.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here.

Talk of the marketplace of ideas encourages us to think of our movement as a business. But that’s a fundamental mistake. Businesses measure their success in terms of profits. The most profitable businesses, however, cater best to the given ideas and preferences of the public. There’s less demand for those who challenge the reigning ideas of the age, so there’s less profit in it.

Thus our movement cannot think in terms of pleasing the public. After all, many of our people seem pleased to be on the path to extinction. Instead, we need to think in terms of improving the public, which many of them will find most displeasing. Our goal is to save our people, even if we have to drag them kicking and screaming into the future.

In sum: Because our people do not widely support White Nationalism (yet), we must improve the public’s ideas and preferences, not cater to them. We must edify our people, not corrupt them. We must lead them, not pander to them. To do this, we must be willing to tell them unflattering truths, not soothing lies. On every point, this is the opposite of what’s rational in the marketplace.

At this point, we need to introduce another distinction between the form and the content of our message.

The content of our message is simple: white people, everywhere on the planet, are on the path to extinction due to mass migration and below-replacement fertility. To save our race, we need a new political system: sovereign homelands for all white peoples. We need governments that put the preservation and advancement of our peoples ahead of competing economic and ideological concerns.

We can’t change any aspect of the content of this message, because there’s no middle ground—no compromise—between survival and extinction. If whites are not pursuing survival, other forces in this world will drag us to extinction.

Currently, this isn’t a popular message. But promoting some other message won’t help us. So our only option is to make White Nationalism more popular.

This brings us to the form of our message. There are infinite ways to promote our ideas. But some are better than others. Since there are many white audiences, populist, elitist, and boutique forms of outreach are all legitimate. Ideally, there should be as many forms of White Nationalism as there are groups of white people. But the core message for every audience must remain unchanged.

However, even though we cannot change our ultimate principles and goals to chase popularity, the form of our message definitely can and should. Metrics like profit and online “engagement” are useful for testing different forms of outreach.

There is a Latin maxim that captures the approach we should take: “suaviter in modo, fortiter in re”—which means flexible in form, inflexible in content. It is necessary to make this distinction, for otherwise, people will be tempted to change the content of our message in pursuit of popularity and profit, instead of trying out new ways of promoting the truth.

I will end with another important distinction: between a business and a profession. Businesses measure success by profits. Professions measure success by promoting the public good. Professions include medicine, law, education, and the clergy. True statesmanship, of course, should be added to this list.

We should think of our movement not as a business but as a profession, serving the common good of the race and, ultimately, of the whole world.

But how do we build institutions that protect this lofty mission from the corrupting incentives of the “marketplace of ideas”? That is the topic of my next essay.