The American group Patriot Front occupied the capital on Independence Day. They look like the Identitarian Movement did five years ago. Why is this emerging in the United States now? Demographics!
(Picture: Patriot Front)
Sometimes activists need not only courage but also luck, and on Independence Day 2026, Fortune smiled on the group led by the 27-year-old Thomas Rousseau. According to the organization itself, 400 members, uniformly dressed and carrying flags, marched through Washington, D.C. The official parade had been canceled because of the heat, leaving the stage entirely to Rousseau and his men. The march and Rousseau’s speech genuinely made headlines around the world, not merely on the right-wing internet. Even mainstream media in Germany covered the event. Not only the white neck gaiters—worn by everyone except Rousseau to protect themselves from doxxing—but virtually everything about Patriot Front recalls the Identitarian Movement, or rather, the Identitarian Movement as it existed three to five years ago. Why is something like this only now emerging in the United States?
Geography and demographics shape not only world politics but also domestic political struggle and the forms it takes. Eight years ago, I wrote for an American audience about a question that was frequently asked at the time: “Why can’t we simply do the same thing they’re doing over there in that other country?” The question itself was entirely legitimate, but it was usually interpreted polemically and answered by claiming that someone was too stupid, too lazy, insufficiently communal, or even actively sabotaging the effort.
In reality, it is a perfectly valid question, and if one approaches it seriously, it leads to a perfectly reasonable answer. At the time, Americans wondered why street activism had reached such a high point in Europe, especially in the German-speaking world, while it was almost entirely absent in the United States. Why was there no American Identitarian Movement? Conversely, many Europeans looked with envy at the viral online activism of the then-young MAGA movement. I explained this by pointing to demographic structure. Europe has roughly twice the population density of the United States; Germany’s is about seven times greater. That makes real-world organization considerably easier. By contrast, the English-language internet naturally provides a far larger market than that of any other language except Chinese. I predicted at the time that these differences would gradually diminish. Quite simply, as a movement grows, it can sustain forms of activism for which the underlying conditions are less than ideal.
By now, much has indeed converged online, and we are now witnessing Identitarian-style activism in the United States. At this point, I am prepared to make another prediction: Patriot Front will likely undergo many of the same experiences as the Identitarian Movement, above all the realization that this kind of activism quickly loses its impact. The period during which a demonstration or an occupation is enough to make national—or even international—headlines does not last long.
Even so, Patriot Front, which was founded in 2017 after the disastrous Charlottesville demonstration, is breaking through under very different circumstances from those facing the Identitarian Movement, founded in 2013, whose peak coincided with Patriot Front’s founding. It will be interesting to observe how these changed conditions, as well as the generational difference, shape its development. Rousseau’s speech would have been unimaginable in any broadly influential right-wing organization in 2017.
My essay from back then, written by an unknown European for an American audience, was never accepted for publication, so I am publishing it here for the first time, unchanged, in German translation. Since Substack does not allow for a sensible separation by language, I have since stopped publishing in English; for this text, however, I will make an exception. Otherwise, permit an intellectual the vanity of pointing out that he turned out to be right. More recently, I have once again been thinking about the impact of such structural factors on political work and organization, most recently in a lecture I gave last Saturday at Castel Aurora in Steyregg. It is a subject that will continue to occupy us.
To answer one final question: no, Thomas Rousseau is neither my long-lost twin nor my secret alter ego. Even so, I am flattered that people apparently cannot visually distinguish me from a 27-year-old.
Now, the 2018 essay:
Demography and Political Activism: Differences Between America and Europe
As a German identitarian who has followed the political development in the United States very closely for the last several years, the fractures within the American right-wing opposition have worried me for quite some time. The United States is, for reasons too numerous to list in this text, the most important battleground for the survival of the white race in general.
Nevertheless, I would never have thought of meddling in the internal politics of the American right, if not for an argument, voiced from time to time, mostly to insult the perceived incompetence of whomever the person in question disagrees with: “Look how these successful right-wing groups and political parties in Europe did it. You are doing the exact opposite!”
This dangerously misleading argument, I think, merits a reply by someone who knows the European situation firsthand. Albeit faced with similar political and demographic problems, there are vast structural differences between the strategic situations of right-wing activists in America and in Europe. Americans trying to copy successful European movements are therefore destined for failure.
In the following text, I’m going to analyze one of these differences, which is usually overlooked: the differences in both population size and density between Europe and the United States.
All of the facts my analysis is based upon are well known, but their consequences are hardly ever thought about. I will try to avoid doling out too much unwanted advice, since the whole point of this analysis is to convince those Americans looking to Europe for a solution to their problems to instead spend their time making the best of their quite unique situation.
Population Density and Real-Life Activism
While both are nearly equal in size (Europe: 3,930,000 sq mi; United States: 3,796,742 sq mi), Europe has more than twice the population density of the United States (Europe: 188 inhabitants per sq mi; United States: 85 inhabitants per sq mi). This is probably the fact most overlooked by those who want to copy European-style right-wing methods.
The implications of population density for political activism are huge, especially for right-wing activism, whose main target population lives disproportionately in rural areas. Because right-wing activists are a small minority among their peoples, high population density is of paramount importance to the success of their real-life activism. Be it for some PR stunt or for large demonstrations, you have to get enough people in one spot. You may think that you only need relatively few people, but in order to get those few people who are not just sharing our opinions but are willing to show their faces in front of cameras, you need areas with lots of people.
The protests in Chemnitz, which have drawn some attention in American right-wing circles, only got thousands of people onto the streets, thereby outnumbering the leftist counter-protesters, who were bussed in by the establishment, because lots of people from outside Chemnitz went there to join the protests. Some came for a weekend trip; most came just for the demonstration and drove home the same evening. It takes only three hours by car from Berlin to Chemnitz and one and a half hours from Dresden.
Another example: A week before the Chemnitz protests, the Identitarian Movement of Germany held a festival in Dresden. I and my identitarian group from Trier went by car to Dresden on Saturday morning, took part in the festival, and returned to Trier on Sunday evening. Trier is in the west of Germany, near the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Dresden is in the east, near the Czech Republic. The lease for the car and the price of the gas added up to about €300—€60 (or $69) for each person. This is affordable for college students. To make it from Los Angeles to New York and back in one weekend, you’d have to fly, the traveling costs being about $500. Some well-earning folks in their forties might spend this much money to attend a conference, but young people simply lack the means to spend this much on political activism.
Leftist protesters against real-life right-wing events may be gutter punks, but oftentimes they don’t have to worry about traveling costs, for either the state (mostly through misused university funds) or some NGO will gladly pay the bill. On top of that, leftists are more concentrated in urban areas than rightists. Most readers will be familiar with the
map linked here. It shows the 2016 presidential election by county. The height of the columns represents the absolute number of votes cast in each county. It’s a few blue towers in a large red field. But the blue towers represent the metropolitan areas, where real-life activism has to take place to even get noticed by the larger public (without generating media attention by killing an obese Antifa woman).
It is well known in media theory that locations themselves have different degrees of newsworthiness, with large cities being more interesting than small hamlets. On top of that, the buildings and monuments with high symbolic value are almost all located in metropolitan areas.
Organization
Of course, core activists have to travel a lot more often than once or twice a year. Connecting groups from different cities and regions, building the all-essential face-to-face trust necessary for any real-life movement—all this necessitates a great deal of traveling.
Germany has a population density of 600.9 inhabitants per sq mi. This is more than three times the European average and seven times the population density of the United States. As a local identitarian leader, I can build a new identitarian chapter in a neighboring city. For every new prospective member, I go there to meet the person face to face. It is a one-and-a-half-hour trip in each direction. With the exception of beer and cigarettes, this recruitment procedure doesn’t cost me a cent. The train ride is still within the parameters under which a student from Trier can use his student ID as a ticket for public transportation.
Copying German or other European models of organizing political dissidence in the United States won’t be possible. It is worth mentioning that not just demographics, but also the party systems in most European countries are better suited to support real-life activism. Large party organizations and proportional representation make it easier to get infrastructure and jobs for the boys. European politics is also financed less through bribes from big donors and more through the legalized embezzlement of public money (aka “public funding of political parties and of organizations connected to political parties”), in which you are entitled to participate in proportion to your share of the vote.
The Economics of Online Activism
On the other hand, if we are speaking of Europe in a political sense, there is no such thing as a polity encompassing the continent’s 741 million inhabitants. There are, as of now, 50 sovereign states on the European continent, even if six of them aren’t universally recognized. This is the reason why online activism is far more advanced in the United States (and Canada) than anywhere in Europe, except perhaps the United Kingdom. I won’t go into social media here, but will instead look at the more traditional kinds of online media.
From an economic standpoint, writing is the easiest form of online activism. You can have a normal job and write (if necessary under a pseudonym) on your own schedule for some online outlet. Writing articles can be done to a surprisingly large extent by amateurs. Producing high-quality videos is an entirely different matter. The fact that video production takes a lot of time, expertise, and expensive equipment to do it properly is the least of the problems.
The market for videos is completely different from the one for texts. To publish texts professionally—meaning not on your personal blog—requires a publisher running an online magazine. These online magazines are, in many cases, the blogs of normal newspapers, journals, or publishing houses, functioning as continuous marketing operations for subscriptions or book sales.
Videos, on the other hand, have to finance themselves. There are hardly any equivalents of online magazines for this kind of media, either. If you are an aspiring author, you send your text to a renowned publisher, and if they consider you good enough, they will publish your work. Thereby you get access to their readership. This makes it possible for a talented amateur writer to write one or two articles per month and still get more than a handful of readers.
If you want to reach people via YouTube, you have to start from scratch, building your own base of viewers. The same goes, for the most part, for podcasts (in this case, the TRS Network is a notable exception). To build a fan base of your own, you have to publish very frequently. Becoming an e-celebrity and maintaining this status is difficult for somebody with a normal job. Of course, lots and lots of normal working people upload their material on YouTube, but good quality and a wide audience require the ability to make a living from this.
The English language provides online activists with a huge market of potential viewers, listeners, and readers. In addition to 360–400 million native speakers, there are 400 million second-language speakers and 600–700 million people who learned it as a foreign language. Lots of those in the second and third categories happen to be non-white, so it is not that easy to estimate the size of the potential market for English right-wing content. But it is safe to assume that it is at least half a billion people. Compare that to 95 million native German speakers worldwide and 80 million who learned it as a foreign language. Danish is the native language of 5.3 million people, and only 0.3 million people have learned it as a foreign language.
As is the case with real-life activism, you need the many to get the few: the viewers, readers, and listeners. From those few, you get the even fewer: those people who keep the whole online activism afloat—the donors and paywall subscribers.
German is the most spoken language in the European Union, but for a right-wing YouTube channel in Germany, it is quite impressive to get 50,000 subscribers. They are nowhere near the 800,000+ of people like Stefan Molyneux. Therefore, it is much more difficult to become a full-time right-wing advocate on YouTube. Consider this: 50,000 subscribers may be enough, depending on the average wealth and generosity of your viewers. But if the top YouTubers have 50,000 subscribers instead of 800,000, that means that the lesser ones have 5,000–15,000 instead of 50,000–100,000.
More abstractly formulated: With a smaller population, the effort-/talent-to-viewers curve flattens. This affects not just every online activist’s economies of scale; it affects the whole online community, reducing the effects of synergy. For example, the very successful format of rightist YouTube live talk shows, spearheaded by Andy Warski and Jean-François Gariépy, is practically non-existent in Germany. There are live streams, but no regular shows like this.
The reason is simple. Each week you would have to get three to five debaters of some internet fame on your show. You would need different debaters each week, and all of them would have to be available at the same time for at least one and a half hours. There are simply not enough YouTube celebrities on the German right to sustain such a format.
For the reasons outlined above, online activism is much more successful in the English-speaking parts of the world.
Conclusions
Demographics matter. This lesson is taught to us not just by the realities of a multicultural society. Demographic differences are an important reason why the dissident right in the United States looks so much different from its European counterparts. Of course, you can do real-life activism in the US, just as you can do online activism in Europe, but the relative importance of the two is different on both sides of the Atlantic. Internal dynamics necessarily reflect the relative importance of online versus real-life activism. People behave differently, whether they interact face-to-face or via the internet. This is just human nature, and there is nothing you can change about that.
These differences between the American and the European right might diminish over time, when our movements grow, thereby gaining the capacity to better sustain kinds of activism for which the respective countries are less than ideally suited. But in the meantime, “Look how the Europeans did it, you moron!” is to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
So much for my text from 2018. The longer I do this, the more interesting it becomes to look back and see which claims that one cast into the abyss of time have actually stood the test of time. By nature, I am not inclined toward excessive optimism, so a time capsule like this does not only show us which problems have remained with us, but also how far we have come since then.
50,000 subscribers on YouTube—that was once considered the pinnacle of success. This platform here, which makes it possible to publish independently, did not even exist back then. A great deal has happened in these interesting times of ours, in which we are either blessed or cursed to live.