The Right’s MGTOW Political Strategy

Retreating from the world won’t make it better

When faced with insurmountable political problems, right-wing internet pundits can’t resist the urge to cry out: RETREAT. The task is so vast, the myriad problems so intractable, that they simply give up. Instead of advising their followers to engage tactically and prudentially with the world around them, they do the opposite: they tell them to withdraw from it and watch the world burn. 

We recently saw this when a report revealed that whites are on track to minority status within the military. The report showed that just 44 percent of Army recruits in 2023 were white, a dramatic drop from 2019 when whites made up 56.4 percent of recruits. 

Denizens of the online Right greeted this as good news. White America, they argued, is dropping out of the woke military and punishing the regime. This new data shows that white Americans have adopted that strategy. It’s claimed that since all American institutions are corrupt, it’s better to retreat than participate. These partisans never articulate what whites or conservatives (both the mainstream and dissident right advocate this position) are supposed to do after withdrawal. It’s just assumed that something good will happen if we all leave the military, the universities, the cities, the corporations, etc.

In an earlier time, male activists fighting feminism adopted a similar strategy for their movement. They called it Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). 

They had a simple theory: if enough men go their own way, women will be forced to change their wicked ways to beg for the men back. 

Despite the MGTOW movement’s efforts, American women have not ditched feminism. If anything, they’ve doubled-down on it in the absence of any GOOD MAN to marry. They certainly aren’t begging the MGTOWers to wife them up. MGTOW in practice doesn’t lead to the social revolution its adherents envision. It just leaves its adherents bitter, alone, and without a family to call their own.

There are many similarities here between the MGTOWers and the Right’s withdrawal strategy. (We’ll call it “Whites Going Their Own Way”: WGTOW). Both think you can force your target to change their behavior through your absence. Both fantasize that their current enemies will beg them to come back. And both think retreat is the best solution to their woes. 

But like MGTOWers, the people who retreat are the ones most harmed by this strategy.

The military could easily adjust to the lack of white recruits by attracting more immigrants (legal and illegal) to the ranks. They may not be as good of soldiers, but they’ll provide the bodies the Army needs. Most importantly, the new Americans won’t care about the DEI agenda or other woke elements. They’ll be content soldiers waiting for their citizenship. It would be terrible if our military turned into a foreign horde led by left-wing bureaucrats. It’s not like the Right has an apparatus to resist the military either. 

While there are good reasons to avoid signing up for the woke military, it’s far worse to hand it over to our enemies. The solution to this problem needs to come from the civilian leadership. A second-term Trump must dedicate himself to rooting out the rot in the military and make it a more attractive prospect to white Americans. But if Biden wins another term, plummeting white recruitment would not be a good thing. Like feminists with MGTOWers, the military will just find others to take the place of whites. And those new soldiers will hold zero loyalty to the historic American nation. Their only loyalty will be to the liberal bureaucrats who pay them.

It’s never a good thing to have your military composed of hostile foreigners. But some on the Right fail to see the issue here. 

It’s not just the military that’s a victim of WGTOW. Universities are another notable example of withdrawal. Whites are disappearing from our elite universities. Johns Hopkins University’s Class of 2026 is only 16 percent white. There are more Hispanic and Asian students at the elite school. It’s a similar story at many other schools. The deans want fewer whites at the prestigious colleges; should white Americans give them what they want by refusing to apply?

White males are a declining demographic in American higher education. Sixty-one percent of college students are now women. The drop among men is most apparent among white men, who used to be the majority of college students. Downscale whites are less likely to go to college than non-whites from equally humble families. But even well-off whites are less likely to attend than affluent non-whites. Among the wealthiest income bracket, white males are the second least likely demographic to attend college. 

Many on the Right celebrate this data. They want whites to go to trade school instead. But a Wall Street Journal report last year found that most of these young men going their own way have no real plan. They just don’t feel like going to college and are stuck doing retail or menial labor instead. They certainly aren’t going to trade school. 

Universities actively discriminate against white applicants, so there is a reason why fewer whites attend post-secondary school. But many young white men are choosing not to go, regardless of the discrimination.

So what are all these Whites Going Their Own Way up to? Apparently no good. The report on the Army’s recruitment woes reports that one issue with attracting heartlanders is that many can’t qualify for service. Many are obese, suffer from drug addiction, or are otherwise unfit to serve. 

Conservatives imagine that all the whites withdrawing from the institutions are doing much better things. But, in truth, most of them are not. They’re stuck in places where they suffer from American decay. They dropped out of society to exist at the margins. They're not protesting the system, they're wallowing in their own dysfunction. Opioidheads and corpulent McDonald’s workers don't have a political existence, let alone a right wing one. Even the plumbers and welders who make good money aren't bubbling with revolutionary fervor. The regime is perfectly fine with whites who are content with fixing toilets rather than bayonets. 

Retreat doesn’t force these institutions to get better. The targets of the protest get worse; and the ones who suffer most are the ones who "went their own way." Instead of improving their lives, their withdrawal immiserates them. 

Conservatives who advocate for withdrawal haven't taken proper stock of contemporary America. There’s no organization, no “secessionist” movement, no rebellious enclave, nor even a separatist identity for them to adopt. It’s just disconnected individuals saying they don’t like the woke military and work at Walmart. That’s hardly a Gandhian revolution in the making. 

The Right imagines the withdrawal like something from an Ayn Rand novel. In Atlas Shrugged, the entrepreneurial class boycotts the corrupt system and forces it to collapse. Another influence on the right-wing psyche comes from Watchmen. In the graphic novel and film, the anti-hero Rorschach delivers a famous rant on what he will do when society collapses:

This city is afraid of me. I've seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!" ...and I'll look down, and whisper "No."

Conservatives see themselves as these characters. One day, the regime will beg the un-woke to come back and save them from their overflowing toilets. But the BASED tradesmen with plungers in hand will look down and say “No.” 

Current reality has nothing in common with these stories. Ayn Rand’s heroes controlled the means of production. Their decision to down the tools had real consequences for the rest of society. Conservative withdrawers don’t have that power. They at best own a small business in some kind of service industry. They aren’t superheroes like Rorschach either. Illegal immigrants can do a lot of their jobs, a problem the Watchmen never faced. 

The military and the universities, like all American institutions, need serious reforms. But total abandonment doesn’t produce desirable results. It does the opposite, giving our enemies more power in America while we retreat to the hinterlands and hope the regime begs for us back. Newsflash: they won’t beg for us back. They’ll just find inferior replacements to do the job and be fine with it, leaving white people as the new serf caste in America. We would have zero power, influence, or wealth. The regime would call on us to fix the air conditioning, and that’s it.

That’s the real result of WGTOW. We can imagine ourselves as Rorschach or John Galt all we want. But those are works of fiction. Reality demands we engage with the world around us and work seriously to build up a counter-elite to make America great again. We don’t accomplish it through retreat.