An alt-center is not moderate—it is alternate—that is, opposed to the discredited establishment. It doesn’t try to be exactly in between, grey, or neutral. It is a synthesis taking the best of different mindsets and ideas to put together the pieces in a way that makes sense.
The alt-right understands that people are not equal and can be categorized quite accurately by race, ethnicity, sex, status, and intelligence. It is hamstrung though by favoring the continuation of a Hobbesian nightmare and tragedy of the commons. Many vanilla republican politicians would readily agree with this stance when it comes to economics and social policy. In this respect, the alt-right is not alternate.
The alt-left understands that you can’t have a real society unless people have a sense of belonging and investment. People cooperate much better if they know there are safety nets if they stumble. It is hamstrung though by failing to understand people vary widely in character and capability. An indiscriminate system of aid quickly degenerates into a tragedy of the commons. The alt left is not alternate in this sense because plenty of the the entrenched technocratic elite share their egalitarian views.
Both alt-right and alt-left retain ideological ties to the conventional platforms they’ve departed from, so in a way of thinking, alt-center, can be thought of as a true-alternate point of view that reaches on both sides and snips the last ties to prevailing political traditions.
On the right, the propaganda of rugged individualism and not taking “handouts” is used to manipulate atomized consumers into letting corporations and wall-street run rampant. The left shrewdly critiqued this view by coining the term “corporate welfare.”
On the left, the shrill politics of victimhood combined with socialist attitudes is a cynical ploy to drain resources from the republican middle and working classes to buy the votes of a teeming underclass that depends on their largesse. The right astutely points out that the leftist elites are trying to “elect a new people” through mass immigration and welfare babies to keep them in power forever.
An alt-center rejects poisonous propaganda positions from both fake sides. It is a complete rejection of the authority of rulers who have long since lost the mandate of heaven through their incompetence and greed, whatever irrelevant side of a made-up spectrum they claim they’re on.
The alt-center recognizes these ideas are just deception used to herd political opinion by parasite-kings and prevent any dangerous(to them) mixtures of ideas from taking place.
Is free healthcare a “left-wing” position when we’re just giving it to members of the tribe we identify with and jealously witholding our wealth from openly-declared blood enemies? What made this stance left-wing is that it was charity without judgment.
Is it “right-wing” to adopt protectionist trade policies when doing away with “free competition” to make sure the newly created jobs go first to people in good standing with the tribe? What made this stance right wing was competition without context.
When we no longer assume an atomized society, to even ask these questions is meaningless. We find ourselves with something different.
Alt-centrism then might be called neo-tribalism, an authoritarian system that maximizes liberties and benefits for cooperators with basic safety nets for all members, generous formal privileges for the best, but treats outgroups as other countries, or within the context of empire as auxiliary associates who are explicitly 2nd class. More important than individuals becoming billionaires would be the ability of society itself to preserve wealth and build assets.
The neo-tribal alt-center understands there is no more nation-state in an age of instant mass communication where hardly anyone farms the land and where we live as semi-nomads drifting from job to job. People, not lines on a map are the territorial borders. Wherever the people set up camp their nation resides in them.
FORWARD BASE B 
10 replies on “Defining the Alt-Center: Neo-Tribalism”
Neo-tribalism, Daniel Quinn has been writing about this idea since the 1990s and earlier. His Ishmael series of books was an important trigger in my awakening. They are good reads, highly recommend them. Ishmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael are the titles in the series.
From what I saw of Sanders and his crowd they would be utterly useless in a real-life scenario. Sanders caved like a house of cards when BLM showed up. The collapse of DC Metrorail is where you are dealing with an entrenched black-dominated union which was able to negotiate an insanely favorable labor agreement, where among other things, the rank and file cannot be fired.
How on earth is a human rights culture going to stop this literal train wreck? And remember, feminists, Jews and gays all identify with blacks whenever white men are getting too blatantly competent. So, they really don’t like the idea of bringing in competent white guys to fix stuff. It rankles them no end. I suspect they’ll stick a knife in General Manager Wiedefeld’s back when he’s denounced as a racist/nazi. See, he wants to outsource metro work to contractors and therefore the black employees would have to compete with other groups, most likely latinos.
I was living in DC watching this incompetence for myself. My GF and I were about 1 train away from getting stuck in that yellow line smoke suffocation disaster that sent 100 people to the hospital and killed someone. About the same time there was a derailing on the orange/blue line already too slow for about a million commuters that crippled the entire system with inspections. Not to mention the inept local black-“run” power company. I spent more than 3 days in 100+ degree temperatures without electricity when hurricane Sandy hit. Will never forget sleeping on concrete floor by washing machines in roach-infested basement of house where I rented a room while working nights, helplessly watching my food paid for with scarce wages rotting and unable to cook any of it to eat. I survived on peanut butter and honey for half a week. John the Baptist would approve if I added in some locusts. So glad I’m out of that shithole of a city. At least those idiot elites get to suffer from their own abject idiocy.
https://colonyofcommodus.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/us-officially-a-third-world-country-no-electricity-in-the-capital/
DC is very expensive these days.
I haven’t used the subway since about 2005. What was your general experience of Metrorail besides the disasters you mention? Did you see a lot of aggressive behavior by young blacks? Did you have to wait and was it crowded? Maybe if you worked nights you missed a lot of typical stuff.
I saw aggression between blacks start to escalate a couple times but when that happens, metro police come onto the train at the very next stop and break it up. The bigger concern, I thought, was overall daily unpleasantness. It’s simply true that blacks tend to be loud and obnoxious practically yelling out to a car packed with 100 people when they have conversations. They know they are a high status “victimized” group and love to let everyone know it whether letting their kids run around screaming on the train or walking as glacially slow as possible across a busy road. I’d hear a lot of impromptu singing and rhymes complete with tapping out rhythms. They really do almost compulsively shuck and jive. They blast loud videos on their phones or their music is so loud it doesn’t even matter that they’re wearing headphones.
They also tend to have horrible BO, smell like Newports for a 20 foot radius, and the women use copious amounts of cloyingly sweet perfumes that literally burn my nostrils when I get within 10 feet of them. Blacks would get all butthurt too if they noticed me changing seats to get away from them.
The WMATA system also lets in bums who sleep, get trashed, beg on the subway all day long until closing time.
To be fair, I absolutely dreaded getting caught in the aftermath of a Nats ballgame stuck with hundreds of drunk redneck assholes with faces beet red from ballpark beer whooping like frat kids playing beer pong.
I hated being stuck next to stuck-up professional types nattering on loudly in nasal uptalk.
Don’t even get me started on clueless tourists blocking escalators.
I don’t know, maybe I just hate people and the big city isn’t for me. There’s no doubt in my mind the rider experience doesn’t need to be so terrible. Even changing small details like the harsh fluorescent lighting meant to make it harder for bums to take naps would be a substantial improvement.
The sheer number of people who still try to drive into DC says I’m not alone.
Thanks for your reply. I believe things have gotten worse in the lasts 12-15 years. Maybe they’ll have quiet cars like on Amtrak one of these days. That ought to trigger a lot of people! It’d be Jim Crow disparate impact – oh the horror, the horror.
Ridership according to the Washington Post has actually gone down in the past 5 years. But the thing is Metrorail is essential for the entire region. They want walkable clusters centered around Metro stations. So, it’s do or die at this point. I’ve heard the term “death spiral” used a few times.
I think the biggest cause of decreasing ridership has been the system’s lack of reliability. Every time a derailing happens or riders get killed it gets compounded because they have to shut down track for inspection and run trains extra slow. Another huge problem is they frequently shut down sections of track for maintenance for days at a time. They let you take the metrobus for free when they do that, but it takes far longer. The final straw was when they kept raising fares on top of everything else. I have no idea if it’s gotten any better since I left in January 2016.
This one is true investigative reporting i.e., a cold hard examinaitoj of reallity written over 5 years ago:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/26/metro-derailed-by-culture-of-complacence-incompete/
This one is innuendo, weasel words and double talk:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/metro-gm-wiedefeld-proposes-new-business-model-and-500-million-a-year-in-new-funding-to-save-transit-agency/2017/04/19/dfc93514-252c-11e7-a1b3-faff0034e2de_story.html?utm_term=.cea4599722b8&wpisrc=nl_lclheads&wpmm=1
You define the alt right verry narrowly. At best you defined it as the libertarian section of it.
Furthermore, the idea of nationalism and hierarchy from the right mixed with solidarity and care for the people from the left is *literally* the foubdation of fascism and national socialism.
[…] hybrids like the ‘alt center’ and the ‘alt-left’ came into being (1, 2, 3). Perhaps such things are to be expected, per Land’s suggestion that the […]