I know you've addressed the technological question before, but with CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies picking up pace, it seems plausible that soon people will be able to edit their phenotype to a significant degree.
Have you thought about how ethno-identitarians should interact with this tech and what it would mean for nationalists?
One very noticeable absence from your philosophical engagements, both in this article and in your videos that I've seen, is Hegel. Of course, you can't write about everyone and everything, but I would have thought Hegel was a top influence based on 1) your defense of positive freedom and 2) your view that the ideal of universal love only finds concrete expression in particular social relations that shape the individual.
For those who want to better understand the famously obscure German philosopher, I'd recommend starting with Roger Scruton's essay on Hegel in his edited volume Conservative Thinkers. Finding this book is difficult, but I can email a pdf copy to anyone who wants one.
Honestly, Hegel is probably the most renowned philosopher who I have engaged with the least, only really reading secondary sources. I did take a great interest in British idealists like F.H. Bradley though, who are often considered Hegelian
Thanks, Keith. Brilliant, as expected. I hope to see this on UNZ. My own vision and plan is at www.mccarthyplan.com My friends around the world like it so far and it is open to change and improvement. It came out of my journey through wars and famines etc. Your thoughts would be most appreciated. I am running as an independent candidate in Lismore, Co. Waterford. My YouTube channel just went up. Search for, Michael McCarthy campaign. You get a mention in one of the posts. I believe that nationalism, correctly understood and presented, is fundamental for world peace and a cleaner natural environment. Thanks for your contribution to national and global solutions. Hopefully we can meet up soon for a chat. Have the best day ever.........
I’m not convinced that political Platonism, with its holistic emphasis on unity, makes a meaningful difference in Anglosphere politics, which is already highly universalistic. The Rawlsian thinking that dominates contemporary American politics has the old English Puritan spirit that sorts the public into the Elect and the Damned based upon support (or lack of) for the rights and justice derived from an a priori methodology. Americans across the political spectrum love love love to punish evildoers at home and abroad. Right or left, we kick ass. Kicking ass is Who We Are. (Whose ass is getting kicked is irrelevant, as long as ass-kicking is in progress.) It is entirely rational, a priori, and without content. American politics is like a sport where the point is not to enact a policy that benefits yourself and your community but to make the "other side" suffer, an energy that those running the place use to fuel private designs. There is a dance here, noted by writers from Twain to Mencken, between hucksters and believers, conmen and the conned.
My liberalism is influenced by Weber, Keynes, and Dewey. I'd like to see policy publicly hammered out politically by confrontations between material interests instead of the pretense that there is a single true outlook that should be rationally intuited, implemented, and policed. That’s my Utopian dream — that Americans will one day finally stop being Utopians.
Another point that should be contested is whether multiculturalism in itself causes strife. In the Austrian Empire, over a dozen ethnic groups coexisted with each other for centuries. In the book The Dark Side of Democracy, the sociologist Michael Mann argued that when we legitimate states by the will of the people, only then does deciding who constitutes "the people" open a can of worms about minorities, stateless peoples, and historical grievances that are not dominant concerns under imperial rule. The democratic mentality facilitates criminal behavior at scale by rationalizing population transfer, ethnic cleansing, and genocide -- final solutions to temporary problems. (Consider what happened to the Armenians, who lived in what is now eastern Turkey for millennia, when the Young Turks came to power.) This isn’t necessarily to say we shouldn’t have popular sovereignty; it is only that such sovereignty has hazards and is not an unalloyed good.
On your last paragraph. I fail to see how this critique applies to what Keith wrote. The whole point of Ethno-nationalism is that the main justification for the state's existence is to protect a certain ethnic or racial group's culture, way of life, security, and foster it's well-being. Popular sovereignty is important, but it's ultimately secondary. The former things listed must come first. As there is no real popular sovereignty in a multiethnic and multicultural state.
"There is an even greater wealth of historical evidence that racial and cultural diversity tends to descend into often brutal conflict."
The historical record shows the opposite, and I say this as a nation enjoyer. Historically, imperial forms of government are the norm. Like everything else in life, empires are a mixed bag, but internal chaos is not one of the negatives, as empires have a strong incentive to maintain peace among diverse groups. In contrast, nationalism, under specific conditions, can make people perceive their neighbors as a demographic threat since a majority decides how things are done, what is taught in schools and in what language, who gets what, who is friend and foe in foreign policy, etc. That's what happened in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere.
Nationalism exists today, paradoxically, because of globalism. Before the American-led order, Throne and Altar were very successful in shutting nationalism down. And they did so with widespread support. As an example, Polish peasants massacred nationalists during the Galician uprising in 1846 because they felt the imperial Austrian government was impartial and fair, in contrast to the nationalistic Polish nobility, which they perceived as wanting to go back to brutal economic exploitation. The revolutions of 1848 failed for similar reasons. Nationalists moralized about principles and LARPed as Napoleonic revolutionaries but refused to economically represent urban and rural workers. They even used force against workers at one point in Paris, which delegitimized liberal nationalist ambitions and added prestige to international socialism. Nationalism has the same problem today. It aligns with people like Elon Musk, who wants us all on twelve-hour shifts six days a week like Chinese workers.
Today, as long as the American taxpayer keeps the peace on the global oceans with eleven expensive carrier strike groups, small countries can exist independently, specialize economically, and thrive in the international economy. Such a highly anomalous historical situation is unlikely to persist. As this order fractures due to demographics and strategic innovations (e.g., drones), regional powers dominating their smaller neighbors will become a thing again. Free trade and nationalism are pure illusions without the reality of American military power backing them up. Without it, smallness and specialization put a state at the economic and strategic mercy of any nearby power with predatory ambitions.
I guess I should've clarified my position more. I know that imperial rule is the norm, I know that ethnicities can be made to coexist, but how they can be made to coexist is the interesting part. So, intermixing people undoubtedly leads to less social cohesion, and even to conflict. That's not really debatable in my view. They can live under the same imperial state technically, but empires didn't intermix people really, for the most part, ethnicities still lived separately. They just so happened to be ruled by the same government. Russia and China are modern examples of this in practice. If anything, this supports my position. It's not my ideal of course, but I don't think it really conflicts with my view all that much.
Also, nationalists do not align with Elon Musk. Elon Musk doesn't align with nationalists. Sure, we liked that he acquired twitter and brought back some level of freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean we align with him.
I'm also not a liberal nationalist from the 19th century. I'm someone with nationalist sympathies in the 21st century. I don't wish to repeat what they did. I'm interested in solving modern problems. And one of those problems is the fact that white countries are being flooded with the third world, and Europeans and diaspora have gone from 20% of the global population to 7% in just 100 years. So I think a healthy amount of nationalism is needed to stop this.
Hi Scythe, contemporary conservatives often provocatively talk about ethnostates in their backlash rhetoric, which is strange, given the majority of the public is already with them on illegal immigration. So the genuine question is whether conservatives (and I include all conservatives, including the dissident right, or however you want to market yourselves) even support the means and ends necessary for ending illegal immigration. If we can't do that, then everything else is LARPing.
For example, the idea of a nineteen-hundred-mile wall, sold to dumb people, is designed never to happen. Why not have a national ID card combined with stiff penalties for employers who hire illegal workers? In America, it is much easier to implement; cracking down on corporations has excellent optics, and it would stop 90% of the problem without much hassle.
The bigger question is whether conservatives even support immigration restriction as an end. I'm not just talking about Mitch McConnell or Boris Johnson. I'm also talking about conservatives like Mark Collett, Millennial Woes, Vox Day, Nick Fuentes, etc., who push fascist rhetoric. When the pandemic gave them the pretext to end illegal immigration forever (sorry, health emergency!), they all became libertarians talking about freedom, profusely explaining how stopping vaccines was more critical than their earlier rhetoric about the white race—very, very strange stuff.
What should a normie think about these bizarre antics that change with the wind? They seem designed to appeal to dumb people with very short time horizons that don't extend farther than six months. Functionally, it isn't white identity politics but white identity backlash politics, used by the rich for their own purposes, which is why you see opportunistic billionaires like Trump and Musk pretending to support it. How am I wrong here?
I think I actually agree broadly with what was being implied with these questions. But I do think you are painting with too broad of a brush. The right is home to people of many different persuasions and views. So I can only speak for myself. I know what you mean when you say conservative, but I'm really not a conservative.
To answer your question, I'm not opposed to any of the things you suggested. Great ideas. The border wall was in fact a half measure. I'm sure you've seen pictures and videos of what was built of the border wall, it's hardly even a wall. And I saw a video of a dude demonstrating how to climb over it fairly easily. Trump is a mixed bag for me, he was the first candidate in a long time to speak on real issues and so we were all hopeful after 2016. But admittedly his presidency was more then lack-luster. I probably won't be voting this election.
On the covid hoopla, it really was hoopla all around. Everyone went insane. I think vaccines are a different issue from immigration. I don't think it's contradictory at all to be against immigration and not take the covid narrative at face value. Sure we could've capitalized on it a bit more, but it's not like Nick Fuentes, or the other people you mentioned(who I'm not necessarily fans of btw) just stopped all the talk about immigration. A lot of us were actually reaming the establishment for the fact that even during a pandemic that was apparently bad enough to have kids do school online and to call for vaccine mandates, the borders remained practically wide open. So I don't think this is as bizarre as you are making it seem.
I didn't fall into the conspiracy trap that many did during covid. A lot of that was pretty stupid. And I wasn't alone, many of us didn't. Even Keith for example caught a lot of flak from others on the right for calling this kind of stuff out. Other then the lab leak theory, which still looks like it's probably true.
Back on the topic of immigration. While yes, anti-immigration sentiment is already popular and growing, we do go further then most people on this issue. We aren't just against illegal immigration. Legal immigration as it stands is also batshit crazy from our perspective. And it's because we realize the demographics of our countries are important. That you can't just take the whole third world, bring them to America, and expect America to still be America. And this goes for all western countries. We still have a lot of work to do in helping people to see the light on this. While I think your ideas for curtailing illegal immigration are good, they are still half measures. I think we should have net zero immigration from certain parts of the world, and yes, essentially along racial lines. I don't see Trump or Elon Musk advocating for this. As I said before, we may have liked that Elon Musk brought us back to twitter, but I don't think we claim him as our guy. So stop trying to lump us in with him. As for Trump, you'll find that here in the dissident right, we are plenty critical of him. So you aren't necessarily wrong, but you shouldn't paint with such a broad brush when it comes to the right wing.
Hi Scythe, from the perspective of political philosophy, anyone explaining conservatism needs to account for its apparent contradictory policy aims not just across space and time but also in the present. It needs to explain why Nick Fuentes, Ben Shapiro, Jared Taylor, and David Goldman all support the same candidate. Otherwise, we're left with nominalism about conservatism.
One could adopt Ted Honderich's perspective and argue that conservatism is simply opportunism. This could be a necessary condition, but it isn't sufficient. Honderich ends up including Tony Blair among the conservatives, which I consider a blunder.
Mark Lilla and Corey Robin come closer to the mark when they focus on what I identify as conservatism's Janus-faced nature. (Janus is the god of portals, doors, transitions, beginnings, and endings.) This perspective suggests that a conservative looks both backward and forward when confronted with what Michael Oakeshott, in his introduction to Hobbes's Leviathan, termed a predicament that shatters an experiential order. Conservatives perceive themselves as shipwrecked by the historical process, which compels them to confront the flux of reality as flux, particularly in a transgressive manner, to chart a new course by reclaiming a lost identity.
A synthesis of both approaches is needed.
Why are David Goldman and Caroline Glick prophets of doom? Why are they pessimistic about America? Because the pessimism justifies the opportunism. If America is a dying nation, then Goldman and Glick are justified in picking the place clean to shore up Israel. Without the story of America in decline, and if most of the problems have readily available solutions, then these people are just evil scumbags.
Conservatives vote for people like Meloni, who predictably do nothing about immigration, even though immigration reduction is wildly popular. I brought up immigration and the pandemic to show that immigration, the Great Replacement, etc., is not a priority for conservatives. A lot of them feel edgy talking about Carl Schmitt. Well, here was a Schmittian state of exception to permanently solve their biggest issue -- the Great Replacement -- and almost all of them, even in the dissident right, immediately turned into lolberts. Really?
So, I distinguish between doomer performance art and policy substance. Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina begins with the sentence that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. A conservative will never describe themselves as a conservative -- they're always an anarcho-capitalist monarchist, classical liberal, Christian Nationalist, MAGA Communist, or some other label.
I'm a behaviorist about defining conservatism. I reject the distinction between moderate and extremist conservatives. Liberals want the distinction because they flatter themselves that they are neutral, objective, pragmatic, scientific, moderate, etc., as if reasonable conservatives are liberal, while the extremists are out of bounds. Conservatives like the distinction because it distances themselves from the unpopular consequences of their policy choices -- the supposed extremists are the unfairly maligned voice of the people, while the institutional moderates are selling out. The cold, hard truth is that Lindsey Graham, David Goldman, and Jared Taylor are functionally equivalent.
Regarding intermixing, people generally kept to their ethno-religious groups in earlier times, but they also lived together in the same territory. In the 1800s, Breslau, Posen, and Königsberg were cosmopolitan cities. The same applies to the Austrian Empire—population transfers to create Wilsonian nation-states didn't happen until the 1900s. No one needs a nation-state for survival.
The motivation for nation-states was inspired by Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel. The argument was that you can only creatively become who you are, whether it be in music, literature, painting, philosophy, etc., when you see yourself in the people in your environment and are, in turn, recognized by them. This point is lost upon men like Jared Taylor when they think of identity in bourgeois terms of IQ and crime statistics. That's not what identity is. Deracinated people are like Japanese men looking at our civilization from the outside, rather than understanding it from the inside. Quantitative arguments for identity and nationality mean it is already over -- it is handegg and cheeseburgers from here forward.
I don't think you really addressed my point. All these so-called cosmopolitan cities you mentioned were cosmopolitan cities among EUROPEANS. Not comparable at all to cosmopolitan cities of today. Like New York, LA, London, Berlin, etc. Where these cities are now home to anyone from a European, to an Arab, to an Indian, and to a sub-Saharan African.
Also, I didn't say that we NEED nation-states to survive, in theory if our birthrates were high enough, we wouldn't. But it certainly helps, and even for reasons you mentioned, the nation-state is just better. Notice how I didn't harp on IQ or crime statistics at all. I actually agree with you that these are low brow arguments. To clarify one more time, I'm a nationalist in principle, but I live in America, I don't expect America to become a nation-state. That's why I would accept a healthy amount of nationalism. Maybe instead of the word nationalism, I should use the word Identitarianism, how about that?
Hi Scythe, that's fair, and I'm all for cultural literacy and a robust, positive awareness of European identity. Clinton and Obama, while criticized for neoliberalism, deserve more credit for articulating a vision of America where everyone can see how they belong.
I agree we need a cultural baseline -- there is only a common good if people have something in common. The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis has symbolic truth. I don't think race has to put a hard ceiling on human cooperation. If, in 2048, the presidential contest was between Saagar Enjeti and Andrew Yang, we would be in better shape compared to where we are now with white Boomers.
To clarify what I'm getting at by cosmopolitan -- it would be an error to say people get along in Singapore because they are mostly "Asian" -- the term is too thin to describe the Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians who live there. Add religion to the mix, and things get more complex -- there are sizable numbers of atheists, Christians, Muslims, Taoists, and Hindus.
I disagree with other liberals in that I do not believe cosmopolitanism works out of the box. If we indiscriminately dump raw biomass together from everywhere while superstitiously chanting about rights, justice, and freedom, we're asking for big problems. In Singapore's case, social harmony resulted from good leadership, governance, and policy, especially by Lee Kuan Yew, a statesman who should be admired as an absolute master of his craft, regardless of one's politics, like Bismarck.
Great essay. Captures the want and need for an ethno-nationalist government and nation brilliantly, also fully agree on your take on economics, there isn't much to be discussed there and neither capitalism nor communism functions properly as evidenced by how they both have fared. Some moderation is obviously needed to ensure economic stability, which should serve the needs of the common man and the creation of a family instead of idiotic economic growth targets.
As for the philosophical, there is obviously a fundamental disagreement between us due to religion. However, as a Christian, I can see a common goal of ascending to a new level of wisdom and love as you stated, and the root and source for that love and wisdom is God, whom we all must strive to find and accept, and I find that to be a true ascendance.
“You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.” (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
You say that there is now “a wealth of evidence that increased diversity lowers social trust”…The very study that you linked in your article does not even make such a broad claim. And whatever conclusions it does make only addresses the short term.
From the study you referenced:
“Inferring from the robust negative relationship between contextual ethnic diversity and social trust detected in our meta-analysis, we would expect, other things being equal, a limited decline in trust over time as countries become increasingly ethnically diverse due to immigration….
…However, over a longer time span and across a broader set of countries, the relationship between ethnic diversity and generalized social trust appears very heterogeneous with no immediately obvious trend (Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2019). Of course, the famous decline in social trust in the United States from the 1960s onward—a period of increasing ethnic diversity—fits the pattern, but it also lends itself to several other explanations (Putnam 2000). Yet, other countries have experienced marked increases in trust over the last decades. Perhaps most strikingly, Denmark, a country that has diversified at a considerable pace since 1980, saw a dramatic increase in generalized social trust—from 47% trusting others in 1979 to 79% in 2009—in this period. Further, ethnic diversity in neighborhoods, municipalities, and workplaces (but not in schools) have all been found to be negatively related to generalized social trust in Denmark during this period (Dinesen 2011; Dinesen & Sønderskov 2012, 2015; Dinesen et al. 2019a), thus highlighting the sometimes dramatically diverging micro-level and over-time macro-level relationships.
(In the summary points at the end) “The rather modest size of these differences implies that apocalyptic claims regarding the severe threat of ethnic diversity are highly exaggerated”
But FYI: All that matters is policy. The online right is a theory-cell circle jerk. -ism this -ism that…
“End All Immigration” is the only issue that matters. The right should have been pushing this last two years lobbying, seducing, whoever will hear it my any excuse necessary.
-blacks need jobs
-roads are crowded
-high crime etc…
-they are ugly and unsuitable.
Trump did so well in 2016 because he said “shit hole countries aren’t sending their best.”
No -isms. People aren’t that smart. Just impose policy and the sheep will nod.
Good article, but I think it's naive to assume a paternal state can reign in markets and herd them to the "common good."
Shitty market behaviour doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from society, the same society political leaders come from. If society has become morally corrupt then the market will reflect that and so will the state. Attempting to solve the problem by making the state more powerful only gives the corrupt more avenues to spread their corruption and punish virtue.
A more robust solution is to restrict the state. With a weak state at least if a portion of the market goes astray, the remainder of society can cut them off and return to a proper course. With a strong state... all it takes is one bad ruler to push the entirety of society into corruption.
Brilliant article.
Thanks!
Excellent stuff man!
What nation today do you believe comes closest to realizing your vision of an ideal society?
Cue in thuletard calling you a THIRD WORLDER AHAHAHAHAHA
Excellent article Keith.
I know you've addressed the technological question before, but with CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies picking up pace, it seems plausible that soon people will be able to edit their phenotype to a significant degree.
Have you thought about how ethno-identitarians should interact with this tech and what it would mean for nationalists?
Valuable credo, God bless.
"Righteousness is the whole practical wisdom of the soul" (Saint Chrysostom)
Great article. Comprehensive yet concise.
One very noticeable absence from your philosophical engagements, both in this article and in your videos that I've seen, is Hegel. Of course, you can't write about everyone and everything, but I would have thought Hegel was a top influence based on 1) your defense of positive freedom and 2) your view that the ideal of universal love only finds concrete expression in particular social relations that shape the individual.
For those who want to better understand the famously obscure German philosopher, I'd recommend starting with Roger Scruton's essay on Hegel in his edited volume Conservative Thinkers. Finding this book is difficult, but I can email a pdf copy to anyone who wants one.
Again, fantastic article.
Honestly, Hegel is probably the most renowned philosopher who I have engaged with the least, only really reading secondary sources. I did take a great interest in British idealists like F.H. Bradley though, who are often considered Hegelian
Hey Andrew, if you have that pdf thatd be great.
Sure, email me at AndrewKnight.RP@proton.me and I'll send it your way.
Thanks, Keith. Brilliant, as expected. I hope to see this on UNZ. My own vision and plan is at www.mccarthyplan.com My friends around the world like it so far and it is open to change and improvement. It came out of my journey through wars and famines etc. Your thoughts would be most appreciated. I am running as an independent candidate in Lismore, Co. Waterford. My YouTube channel just went up. Search for, Michael McCarthy campaign. You get a mention in one of the posts. I believe that nationalism, correctly understood and presented, is fundamental for world peace and a cleaner natural environment. Thanks for your contribution to national and global solutions. Hopefully we can meet up soon for a chat. Have the best day ever.........
I’m not convinced that political Platonism, with its holistic emphasis on unity, makes a meaningful difference in Anglosphere politics, which is already highly universalistic. The Rawlsian thinking that dominates contemporary American politics has the old English Puritan spirit that sorts the public into the Elect and the Damned based upon support (or lack of) for the rights and justice derived from an a priori methodology. Americans across the political spectrum love love love to punish evildoers at home and abroad. Right or left, we kick ass. Kicking ass is Who We Are. (Whose ass is getting kicked is irrelevant, as long as ass-kicking is in progress.) It is entirely rational, a priori, and without content. American politics is like a sport where the point is not to enact a policy that benefits yourself and your community but to make the "other side" suffer, an energy that those running the place use to fuel private designs. There is a dance here, noted by writers from Twain to Mencken, between hucksters and believers, conmen and the conned.
My liberalism is influenced by Weber, Keynes, and Dewey. I'd like to see policy publicly hammered out politically by confrontations between material interests instead of the pretense that there is a single true outlook that should be rationally intuited, implemented, and policed. That’s my Utopian dream — that Americans will one day finally stop being Utopians.
Another point that should be contested is whether multiculturalism in itself causes strife. In the Austrian Empire, over a dozen ethnic groups coexisted with each other for centuries. In the book The Dark Side of Democracy, the sociologist Michael Mann argued that when we legitimate states by the will of the people, only then does deciding who constitutes "the people" open a can of worms about minorities, stateless peoples, and historical grievances that are not dominant concerns under imperial rule. The democratic mentality facilitates criminal behavior at scale by rationalizing population transfer, ethnic cleansing, and genocide -- final solutions to temporary problems. (Consider what happened to the Armenians, who lived in what is now eastern Turkey for millennia, when the Young Turks came to power.) This isn’t necessarily to say we shouldn’t have popular sovereignty; it is only that such sovereignty has hazards and is not an unalloyed good.
On your last paragraph. I fail to see how this critique applies to what Keith wrote. The whole point of Ethno-nationalism is that the main justification for the state's existence is to protect a certain ethnic or racial group's culture, way of life, security, and foster it's well-being. Popular sovereignty is important, but it's ultimately secondary. The former things listed must come first. As there is no real popular sovereignty in a multiethnic and multicultural state.
Keith wrote that
"There is an even greater wealth of historical evidence that racial and cultural diversity tends to descend into often brutal conflict."
The historical record shows the opposite, and I say this as a nation enjoyer. Historically, imperial forms of government are the norm. Like everything else in life, empires are a mixed bag, but internal chaos is not one of the negatives, as empires have a strong incentive to maintain peace among diverse groups. In contrast, nationalism, under specific conditions, can make people perceive their neighbors as a demographic threat since a majority decides how things are done, what is taught in schools and in what language, who gets what, who is friend and foe in foreign policy, etc. That's what happened in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere.
Nationalism exists today, paradoxically, because of globalism. Before the American-led order, Throne and Altar were very successful in shutting nationalism down. And they did so with widespread support. As an example, Polish peasants massacred nationalists during the Galician uprising in 1846 because they felt the imperial Austrian government was impartial and fair, in contrast to the nationalistic Polish nobility, which they perceived as wanting to go back to brutal economic exploitation. The revolutions of 1848 failed for similar reasons. Nationalists moralized about principles and LARPed as Napoleonic revolutionaries but refused to economically represent urban and rural workers. They even used force against workers at one point in Paris, which delegitimized liberal nationalist ambitions and added prestige to international socialism. Nationalism has the same problem today. It aligns with people like Elon Musk, who wants us all on twelve-hour shifts six days a week like Chinese workers.
Today, as long as the American taxpayer keeps the peace on the global oceans with eleven expensive carrier strike groups, small countries can exist independently, specialize economically, and thrive in the international economy. Such a highly anomalous historical situation is unlikely to persist. As this order fractures due to demographics and strategic innovations (e.g., drones), regional powers dominating their smaller neighbors will become a thing again. Free trade and nationalism are pure illusions without the reality of American military power backing them up. Without it, smallness and specialization put a state at the economic and strategic mercy of any nearby power with predatory ambitions.
I guess I should've clarified my position more. I know that imperial rule is the norm, I know that ethnicities can be made to coexist, but how they can be made to coexist is the interesting part. So, intermixing people undoubtedly leads to less social cohesion, and even to conflict. That's not really debatable in my view. They can live under the same imperial state technically, but empires didn't intermix people really, for the most part, ethnicities still lived separately. They just so happened to be ruled by the same government. Russia and China are modern examples of this in practice. If anything, this supports my position. It's not my ideal of course, but I don't think it really conflicts with my view all that much.
Also, nationalists do not align with Elon Musk. Elon Musk doesn't align with nationalists. Sure, we liked that he acquired twitter and brought back some level of freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean we align with him.
I'm also not a liberal nationalist from the 19th century. I'm someone with nationalist sympathies in the 21st century. I don't wish to repeat what they did. I'm interested in solving modern problems. And one of those problems is the fact that white countries are being flooded with the third world, and Europeans and diaspora have gone from 20% of the global population to 7% in just 100 years. So I think a healthy amount of nationalism is needed to stop this.
Hi Scythe, contemporary conservatives often provocatively talk about ethnostates in their backlash rhetoric, which is strange, given the majority of the public is already with them on illegal immigration. So the genuine question is whether conservatives (and I include all conservatives, including the dissident right, or however you want to market yourselves) even support the means and ends necessary for ending illegal immigration. If we can't do that, then everything else is LARPing.
For example, the idea of a nineteen-hundred-mile wall, sold to dumb people, is designed never to happen. Why not have a national ID card combined with stiff penalties for employers who hire illegal workers? In America, it is much easier to implement; cracking down on corporations has excellent optics, and it would stop 90% of the problem without much hassle.
The bigger question is whether conservatives even support immigration restriction as an end. I'm not just talking about Mitch McConnell or Boris Johnson. I'm also talking about conservatives like Mark Collett, Millennial Woes, Vox Day, Nick Fuentes, etc., who push fascist rhetoric. When the pandemic gave them the pretext to end illegal immigration forever (sorry, health emergency!), they all became libertarians talking about freedom, profusely explaining how stopping vaccines was more critical than their earlier rhetoric about the white race—very, very strange stuff.
What should a normie think about these bizarre antics that change with the wind? They seem designed to appeal to dumb people with very short time horizons that don't extend farther than six months. Functionally, it isn't white identity politics but white identity backlash politics, used by the rich for their own purposes, which is why you see opportunistic billionaires like Trump and Musk pretending to support it. How am I wrong here?
I think I actually agree broadly with what was being implied with these questions. But I do think you are painting with too broad of a brush. The right is home to people of many different persuasions and views. So I can only speak for myself. I know what you mean when you say conservative, but I'm really not a conservative.
To answer your question, I'm not opposed to any of the things you suggested. Great ideas. The border wall was in fact a half measure. I'm sure you've seen pictures and videos of what was built of the border wall, it's hardly even a wall. And I saw a video of a dude demonstrating how to climb over it fairly easily. Trump is a mixed bag for me, he was the first candidate in a long time to speak on real issues and so we were all hopeful after 2016. But admittedly his presidency was more then lack-luster. I probably won't be voting this election.
On the covid hoopla, it really was hoopla all around. Everyone went insane. I think vaccines are a different issue from immigration. I don't think it's contradictory at all to be against immigration and not take the covid narrative at face value. Sure we could've capitalized on it a bit more, but it's not like Nick Fuentes, or the other people you mentioned(who I'm not necessarily fans of btw) just stopped all the talk about immigration. A lot of us were actually reaming the establishment for the fact that even during a pandemic that was apparently bad enough to have kids do school online and to call for vaccine mandates, the borders remained practically wide open. So I don't think this is as bizarre as you are making it seem.
I didn't fall into the conspiracy trap that many did during covid. A lot of that was pretty stupid. And I wasn't alone, many of us didn't. Even Keith for example caught a lot of flak from others on the right for calling this kind of stuff out. Other then the lab leak theory, which still looks like it's probably true.
Back on the topic of immigration. While yes, anti-immigration sentiment is already popular and growing, we do go further then most people on this issue. We aren't just against illegal immigration. Legal immigration as it stands is also batshit crazy from our perspective. And it's because we realize the demographics of our countries are important. That you can't just take the whole third world, bring them to America, and expect America to still be America. And this goes for all western countries. We still have a lot of work to do in helping people to see the light on this. While I think your ideas for curtailing illegal immigration are good, they are still half measures. I think we should have net zero immigration from certain parts of the world, and yes, essentially along racial lines. I don't see Trump or Elon Musk advocating for this. As I said before, we may have liked that Elon Musk brought us back to twitter, but I don't think we claim him as our guy. So stop trying to lump us in with him. As for Trump, you'll find that here in the dissident right, we are plenty critical of him. So you aren't necessarily wrong, but you shouldn't paint with such a broad brush when it comes to the right wing.
Hi Scythe, from the perspective of political philosophy, anyone explaining conservatism needs to account for its apparent contradictory policy aims not just across space and time but also in the present. It needs to explain why Nick Fuentes, Ben Shapiro, Jared Taylor, and David Goldman all support the same candidate. Otherwise, we're left with nominalism about conservatism.
One could adopt Ted Honderich's perspective and argue that conservatism is simply opportunism. This could be a necessary condition, but it isn't sufficient. Honderich ends up including Tony Blair among the conservatives, which I consider a blunder.
Mark Lilla and Corey Robin come closer to the mark when they focus on what I identify as conservatism's Janus-faced nature. (Janus is the god of portals, doors, transitions, beginnings, and endings.) This perspective suggests that a conservative looks both backward and forward when confronted with what Michael Oakeshott, in his introduction to Hobbes's Leviathan, termed a predicament that shatters an experiential order. Conservatives perceive themselves as shipwrecked by the historical process, which compels them to confront the flux of reality as flux, particularly in a transgressive manner, to chart a new course by reclaiming a lost identity.
A synthesis of both approaches is needed.
Why are David Goldman and Caroline Glick prophets of doom? Why are they pessimistic about America? Because the pessimism justifies the opportunism. If America is a dying nation, then Goldman and Glick are justified in picking the place clean to shore up Israel. Without the story of America in decline, and if most of the problems have readily available solutions, then these people are just evil scumbags.
Conservatives vote for people like Meloni, who predictably do nothing about immigration, even though immigration reduction is wildly popular. I brought up immigration and the pandemic to show that immigration, the Great Replacement, etc., is not a priority for conservatives. A lot of them feel edgy talking about Carl Schmitt. Well, here was a Schmittian state of exception to permanently solve their biggest issue -- the Great Replacement -- and almost all of them, even in the dissident right, immediately turned into lolberts. Really?
So, I distinguish between doomer performance art and policy substance. Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina begins with the sentence that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. A conservative will never describe themselves as a conservative -- they're always an anarcho-capitalist monarchist, classical liberal, Christian Nationalist, MAGA Communist, or some other label.
I'm a behaviorist about defining conservatism. I reject the distinction between moderate and extremist conservatives. Liberals want the distinction because they flatter themselves that they are neutral, objective, pragmatic, scientific, moderate, etc., as if reasonable conservatives are liberal, while the extremists are out of bounds. Conservatives like the distinction because it distances themselves from the unpopular consequences of their policy choices -- the supposed extremists are the unfairly maligned voice of the people, while the institutional moderates are selling out. The cold, hard truth is that Lindsey Graham, David Goldman, and Jared Taylor are functionally equivalent.
Regarding intermixing, people generally kept to their ethno-religious groups in earlier times, but they also lived together in the same territory. In the 1800s, Breslau, Posen, and Königsberg were cosmopolitan cities. The same applies to the Austrian Empire—population transfers to create Wilsonian nation-states didn't happen until the 1900s. No one needs a nation-state for survival.
The motivation for nation-states was inspired by Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel. The argument was that you can only creatively become who you are, whether it be in music, literature, painting, philosophy, etc., when you see yourself in the people in your environment and are, in turn, recognized by them. This point is lost upon men like Jared Taylor when they think of identity in bourgeois terms of IQ and crime statistics. That's not what identity is. Deracinated people are like Japanese men looking at our civilization from the outside, rather than understanding it from the inside. Quantitative arguments for identity and nationality mean it is already over -- it is handegg and cheeseburgers from here forward.
I don't think you really addressed my point. All these so-called cosmopolitan cities you mentioned were cosmopolitan cities among EUROPEANS. Not comparable at all to cosmopolitan cities of today. Like New York, LA, London, Berlin, etc. Where these cities are now home to anyone from a European, to an Arab, to an Indian, and to a sub-Saharan African.
Also, I didn't say that we NEED nation-states to survive, in theory if our birthrates were high enough, we wouldn't. But it certainly helps, and even for reasons you mentioned, the nation-state is just better. Notice how I didn't harp on IQ or crime statistics at all. I actually agree with you that these are low brow arguments. To clarify one more time, I'm a nationalist in principle, but I live in America, I don't expect America to become a nation-state. That's why I would accept a healthy amount of nationalism. Maybe instead of the word nationalism, I should use the word Identitarianism, how about that?
Hi Scythe, that's fair, and I'm all for cultural literacy and a robust, positive awareness of European identity. Clinton and Obama, while criticized for neoliberalism, deserve more credit for articulating a vision of America where everyone can see how they belong.
I agree we need a cultural baseline -- there is only a common good if people have something in common. The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis has symbolic truth. I don't think race has to put a hard ceiling on human cooperation. If, in 2048, the presidential contest was between Saagar Enjeti and Andrew Yang, we would be in better shape compared to where we are now with white Boomers.
To clarify what I'm getting at by cosmopolitan -- it would be an error to say people get along in Singapore because they are mostly "Asian" -- the term is too thin to describe the Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians who live there. Add religion to the mix, and things get more complex -- there are sizable numbers of atheists, Christians, Muslims, Taoists, and Hindus.
I disagree with other liberals in that I do not believe cosmopolitanism works out of the box. If we indiscriminately dump raw biomass together from everywhere while superstitiously chanting about rights, justice, and freedom, we're asking for big problems. In Singapore's case, social harmony resulted from good leadership, governance, and policy, especially by Lee Kuan Yew, a statesman who should be admired as an absolute master of his craft, regardless of one's politics, like Bismarck.
Great essay. Captures the want and need for an ethno-nationalist government and nation brilliantly, also fully agree on your take on economics, there isn't much to be discussed there and neither capitalism nor communism functions properly as evidenced by how they both have fared. Some moderation is obviously needed to ensure economic stability, which should serve the needs of the common man and the creation of a family instead of idiotic economic growth targets.
As for the philosophical, there is obviously a fundamental disagreement between us due to religion. However, as a Christian, I can see a common goal of ascending to a new level of wisdom and love as you stated, and the root and source for that love and wisdom is God, whom we all must strive to find and accept, and I find that to be a true ascendance.
“You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.” (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
I just got round to reading this, Keith. Excellent stuff.
The only difference between us is my Catholic integralism of course, but I can find nothing I disagree with here.
Excellent article.
You say that there is now “a wealth of evidence that increased diversity lowers social trust”…The very study that you linked in your article does not even make such a broad claim. And whatever conclusions it does make only addresses the short term.
From the study you referenced:
“Inferring from the robust negative relationship between contextual ethnic diversity and social trust detected in our meta-analysis, we would expect, other things being equal, a limited decline in trust over time as countries become increasingly ethnically diverse due to immigration….
…However, over a longer time span and across a broader set of countries, the relationship between ethnic diversity and generalized social trust appears very heterogeneous with no immediately obvious trend (Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2019). Of course, the famous decline in social trust in the United States from the 1960s onward—a period of increasing ethnic diversity—fits the pattern, but it also lends itself to several other explanations (Putnam 2000). Yet, other countries have experienced marked increases in trust over the last decades. Perhaps most strikingly, Denmark, a country that has diversified at a considerable pace since 1980, saw a dramatic increase in generalized social trust—from 47% trusting others in 1979 to 79% in 2009—in this period. Further, ethnic diversity in neighborhoods, municipalities, and workplaces (but not in schools) have all been found to be negatively related to generalized social trust in Denmark during this period (Dinesen 2011; Dinesen & Sønderskov 2012, 2015; Dinesen et al. 2019a), thus highlighting the sometimes dramatically diverging micro-level and over-time macro-level relationships.
(In the summary points at the end) “The rather modest size of these differences implies that apocalyptic claims regarding the severe threat of ethnic diversity are highly exaggerated”
Enjoy your writing & commentary as always:
But FYI: All that matters is policy. The online right is a theory-cell circle jerk. -ism this -ism that…
“End All Immigration” is the only issue that matters. The right should have been pushing this last two years lobbying, seducing, whoever will hear it my any excuse necessary.
-blacks need jobs
-roads are crowded
-high crime etc…
-they are ugly and unsuitable.
Trump did so well in 2016 because he said “shit hole countries aren’t sending their best.”
No -isms. People aren’t that smart. Just impose policy and the sheep will nod.
Good article, but I think it's naive to assume a paternal state can reign in markets and herd them to the "common good."
Shitty market behaviour doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from society, the same society political leaders come from. If society has become morally corrupt then the market will reflect that and so will the state. Attempting to solve the problem by making the state more powerful only gives the corrupt more avenues to spread their corruption and punish virtue.
A more robust solution is to restrict the state. With a weak state at least if a portion of the market goes astray, the remainder of society can cut them off and return to a proper course. With a strong state... all it takes is one bad ruler to push the entirety of society into corruption.