Amerika

Since 1945, the right-wing of politics has been in the doghouse. Hitler was a rightist leader, and no one wants to be seen as a Hitler supporter. Even more, no one wants to ally themselves with a losing side. Even worse, the left has championed all things social, especially hedonism, status, “fun” and of course individualism. It’s a hard road back.

As such, the right has existed in two forms: a public form that is neoliberal, or neoconservative, but either way liberal in essence although conservative in appearance; a private form that is withdrawn, paranoid, violent and dogmatic, and as such generally appeals to people who have already dropped out of society and decided to have an extreme emotional response to it.

The right is now birthing from that latter form to re-claim the public former form. That means we may for the first time in sixty years have actual right-wing candidates who are not fringe dwellers. This would mean a real chance at power, but that we have to actually play our cards right.

One big impediment: the right no longer knows what it stands for. It has a laundry list of issues, most of which cannot be decided because few understand what the right itself is about. And as part of its growing pains, there’s a huge internal struggle between the mainstream conservatives of European and American types (who are almost opposites), and alienated radicals:

Ideology is often written down in a book like “Das Kapital” or “Mein Kampf” and treated like a bible. The same explanation is applied to every situation when the progress to utopia fails one group is blamed for everything by connotive terms like “racism” which is only applied to Whites, never are the other racial groups dehumanised in this way! It always needs an enemy like the devil in religion to oppose and measure yourself against. Nazism was based on opposition to Jews, multi-racialism to “Whites” who are the scapegoats if anything goes wrong.

But traditional nationalism is different and grows from emotional bonding with kith and kin who belong to communities of similar people. We need an articulation of that. Its not that everyone should hold identical views but they need some central tenets to unite them which allows differences of opinion to be discussed within nationalist parameters.

We are heirs to a traditional thread of nationalism which was expressed through the Conservative party and until the Second World War most Socialists were patriotic when nationalism was deliberately slurred bt labelling it Nazism!. Most parties are now vehicles for utopianism or progressivism that grew from the Enlightenment. We need to link with our patriotic traditions but adapt them to contemporary circumstances. This would link us to our history and patriotic traditions and provide role models and quotations in abundance instead of constantly having to dissemble when asked about Hitler and the Holocaust as the BNP leaders do.

The activists were the main reason the party got where it did because of their tireless devotion to the cause. But because there was no coherent point of view, people would join with different ideas of the party’s political standpoint. We have a definite set of values inherited from our ancestors that would reduce tension and future schisms. I do not mean an Ideology written in a book that everyone has to conform as under Pol Pot or Chairman Mao; I mean organise our values and beliefs coherently. – SMA

These reformers navigate between modern conservatives, who are neoliberals or neoconservatives depending on how you choose to phrase it, and are opposed to nationalism, or the idea of a single ethnic group ruling itself. They prefer patriotism, which is rallying us around a political or economic ideal so that it has huge numbers of supporters, and then using that demographic weight to achieve their political ends. We call that type of society “the dogmatic state.”

Nationalists think the other way around. Instead of using the people of a nation as the means to its political ends, they use politics as a means to support the people of that nation — but this requires they carefully define who the nation is, and ensure these people are linked by heritage, values, customs and culture so that they do not require the heavy police state that inevitably leads to the dogmatic state.

The term “nationalism” is generally used to describe two phenomena: (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination. (1) raises questions about the concept of nation (or national identity), which is often defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and while an individual’s membership in a nation is often regarded as involuntary, it is sometimes regarded as voluntary. (2) raises questions about whether self-determination must be understood as involving having full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or whether something less is required.

It is traditional, therefore, to distinguish nations from states — whereas a nation often consists of an ethnic or cultural community, a state is a political entity with a high degree of sovereignty. While many states are nations in some sense, there are many nations which are not fully sovereign states. – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy via Pan-Nationalism

Modern conservatism is defined not by its values, but by its political methods that distinguish it from other parties. Modern conservatives aim to pander to an audience and use its votes to stay in power in a predominantly liberal time. While this is clearly a rearguard action, it seemed less desperate than staying ideologically true and being minimized.

As a philosophy, conservatism espouses the following:

• Consequentialism. This is the biggest part of conservatism: results matter more than morality, feelings, appearances or social popularity. Everything is a means to an end, and if the results of our actions turned out badly, we need to figure out why and to avoid it. Even more, we can find some methods that always work, a kind of political Scientific Method, and use those instead of others. Summary: there is a right way to do things, and it is time-proven, and it trumps any new but unproven notions.
• Conservation. As a corollary to the above, there are some products from multiple successful actions that we should cherish and conserve. Culture, customs, values, language, art, traditional religion and last but not least, our organic history of “blood and soil,” meaning that we conserve both heritage and our geographical homelands including their natural wildlife, plants, ecosystems, forests and geological features.
• Social Darwinism. Part of conserving is to ensure that the best thrive. When we have farms, we keep the seed from the healthiest plants to stick in the ground the following year. Before genetically modified crops, farmers over many generations took everyday weeds and made them into high-producing crops. One other aspect to this is our people. We need to always reward the actual best, not just the most manipulative or popular. We need a replacement for natural selection or we stagnate.
• Self-discipline. People hate to hear this one, because it sounds “un-fun,” but self-discipline, systematic thought, and control of our emotions are conservative values. We are defined by our experience, and the types of things we experience we tend to replicate in future actions. When conservatives endorse chastity, relative sobriety, hard work, studying, and avoiding time-wasting activities, we are talking about conditioning our minds and bodies for the best possible outcomes.
• Moral attention. To the conservative mind, consequences matter more than intent. If you didn’t mean to shoot anyone, but you did, the result is someone shot — whether you meant it or not. In the same way, even our actions at home alone condition our view of the world and how we will treat others. Healthy societies are constantly at moral attention, filtering out the destructive and endorsing the good.

This is a starting list of true conservative values. You will notice that exactly zero of these are popular. That is because what is popular is always wish-fulfillment fantasies (“you can be a rock star”), making excuses (“you’re only poor because of the Reds, not because you do so much meth”), endorsing hedonism (“if it feels good, do it”) and encouraging apathy and complacency.

Popularity, if measured by the numbers, favors the couch-sitting, the delusional and the criminal. These are the lowest common denominator of human activity and are selected by the principle of tolerance: if something really bad is OK, then whatever I’m doing that’s half bad must surely also be OK. Conservatism strikes in the opposite direction which is collectivist in an organic and not individualistic context: what is healthy for the nation as a whole is good, whatever subverts the healthy is bad, and everything else should be left alone.

Contrast this with leftism/liberalism/progressivism (which are different terms for the same thing at different stages of its life cycle) which insists on a singular truth for each individual which is then applied to the whole:

Political correctness attempts or intends (implicitly) to solve this incoherence by aiming/ intending (at some point) to enforce equality of status in all discourse (public and personal – as in the slogan ‘the personal is political’) – therefore PC is intrinsically totalitarian.

This totalitarianism is justified on a utilitarian basis: that of promoting happiness and preventing suffering; and on the pragmatic basis that anything less than total control of discourse will be subverted and ineffective. – Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany

Conservatism is anti-utilitarian. By acknowledging the collective, we are able to recognize where people are more equal than others. This encourages all of us to keep striving, to keep growing, and to keep pushing ourselves past our comfort zones. When we rise to a challenge we are acknowledged. When we do something wrong, we are punished. This creates a society where people know what will be rewarded and can live up to it.

The opposite of this, utilitarianism, depends on the lowest common denominator. “The best for the most” is in theory the foundation of utilitarianism, but inevitably out come the opinion polls, and so it becomes “What most people think is best,” which is a synonym for the lowest common denominator. A roomful of people will have different political opinions, but they all agree we need food, air, water and television. Thus the solution to our political problems becomes: more television.

However, adapting conservatism to a modern and postmodern time (the two exist simultaneously, one being pure machine-function and the second, machine-function with pluralism/political correctness installed) is difficult because the population is “educated” — their way of feeling like they’ve raised their status and are better than others — to think the exact opposite. For some reason, the right let the hippies teach its children and the result is the true walking zombies of the millennial generation.

In addition to that difficulty, leftists are taught to scream RACIST at conservatives and to consider conservatives to be blue-collar, ign’ant, simple folk who just want to vote rightist so they can consider themselves a privileged elite. The covert side of right-wing politics plays into this by being crypto-Nazis who have no actual plan for what they do like, only a laundry list of what they do not like.

At this blog, we bridge the gap between mainstream conservatism, the New Right, crunchy paleoconservatism (conservationism) and nationalism. We are not “white nationalists” in that white nationalism is too limited; it’s a single-issue vote that does not contain a complete political system. Conservatism does, and if updated and refined, it provides the stability that America and Europe need.

Boris’s point that racial tribalism did not exist before the modern era is not correct. This tribalism did not express itself as “white nationalism” or even as “white” as it was often bound up with ethnic and religious identity. But the people of Europe and the ancient world were highly conscious of race and saw it as a determing aspect of life. Again, they usually saw it as bound up with other aspects of identity, such as tribe, clan, ethnicity and religion. Virgils’ Aeneid is a story of racial consciousness, as Aeneas sets out from the ruins of Troy to found a new nation, which will be the basis for an entire civilization. This new civilization is not based on ideas, but racial and tribal identity. He does not stay in Carthage, despite the temptation to do so. His people and his ultimate destiny are not there.

Ancient people and later Europeans did not intermarry or form integrated communties with other races despite extensive mixing with the peoples of Asia and Africa. The white race also has for many hundreds of years had an overriding transcendent aspect to its collective identity in the form of Christianity.

I am confused by Boris’s point that we cannot treat the white race as “an objectively fixed entity.” It is treated as an objectively fixed entity every hour of the day. It is a determining factor in where we live, what jobs we get, what colleges we get into, what scholarships we receive, whom we marry and where we send our children to school. Whites may not perceive the white race as “an objectively fixed entity,” but others do. – The Thinking Housewife

What you are seeing above is a conservative viewpoint. It includes race, because race is a record of not just evolution but the moral choices made by different populations, and to deny race is to deny a huge part of reality. However, it doesn’t let race “wag the dog” by being the one issue that takes over every other issue. Instead, it’s a mature and sober assessment of its position within conservative orthodoxy.

As Hunter Wallace points out in response to the post quoted above, nationalism is part of conservatism, not the other way around:

In so many words, “whiteness” (and the hierarchy of rights and privileges based on race) became an integral aspect of Americanism.

It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the various components of traditional Americanism – whiteness, English language, Protestant Christianity, republican ideology – became unglued and the racial fragment of Americanism became the base of a new universalist ideology – this idea of “our race is our nation” – which Boris S. is attacking here as a straw man.

(2) As I explained above, the roots of White Nationalism can be traced back to the English colonization of North America. The fair complexion of the English settlers stood out in stark contrast to the dark complexion of indigenous Indian tribes and negro slaves.

The children of the original American colonists and succeeding generations increasingly began to define themselves in racial terms. They did this for several reasons:

– In order to retain their distinctiveness as Indians and negroes converted to Christianity.

– In order to distinguish themselves from the English parent stock.

– In order to maximize White unity in an alien region in which hostile Indians and slave rebellions posed a serious threat to the survival of the colonies.

– In order to better facilitate the project of conquering and settling North America.

There is nothing remarkable about this type of ethnogenesis. The same process happened to a lesser degree in Australia and New Zealand as well as in European colonies in Africa.

Black slaves in the New World went through a similar type of ethnogenesis. Negroes intermarried and lost their tribal distinctiveness in favor a common racial identity. They also evolved over time into a new people.

This was going on in North America for centuries before anyone ever heard of Adolf Hitler. – OD

On the Right, we have suffered too long over squabbles. The New Right wants to hate America and not realize that “Americanization” is a process that began in Europe (UK) and continues anywhere multiculturalism and the facilitative-utilitarian society is tried; the American conservatives are too in love with big business and big religion to get to the core utility of those two loves, namely Social Darwinism and transcendentalism as underpinnings of society; the “white nationalists” are angry, alienated and determined to offend everyone so that they do not have to challenge themselves with the burden of being successful and having to adopt their wild ideas to practical, physical solutions.

As said elsewhere:

The Conservative party was a “National” Conservative party which put the national interest first, not the Global economy. We are their natural successors and must position ourselves as such. This would give supporters a secure base to argue from with abundant role models and quotes from our history and that would strengthen their conviction which would impress their hearers more. People follow the dominant elites. Even those who agree with us vote for one of the dominant elites’ parties and a conviction based on the knowledge that we follow great national figures would counter that disadvantage. This is why the mainstream parties fight mainly over floating voters. It is a mistake to lament they have not woken up when we are not putting our case with enough confidence.

In our invidious position, on the edge of final destruction, we need to form links of expediency with Jewish communities and other groups who are likewise in invidious positions like Hindus and Sikhs, but we must make it clear that this is our country and our people take priority. We are being invaded by a common enemy. Jewish people tend to regard “White Christians” as the threat to them but must transcend the Ghetto Mentality which inclines them to join other ethnic groups against us and understand that the Muslims hate them first. They must realist that their people are under attack in France and Malmo, Sweden and when Cameron and Milliband get Turkey in the EU they will be openly persecuted! Mass immigration has changed everything and old enmities are no longer feasible. – SMA

We must get out of the intellectual ghetto of hatred, status politics and extremism. Instead, we must become what our citizens deserve, which is a practical, sober-minded and realistic political party that fixes as many problems as possible. Extremism narrows us to one issue that, while essential, obstructs us from addressing the other 99% of the problem. If we don’t fix the problem as a whole, we don’t deliver, and then the next election replaces us with liberals, possibly for a long time much as WWII demonized conservatism for sixty years.

The stakes are high. Do we rise to the occasion, or revert to our camps and infighting? Only time will tell.