Majorityrights Central > Category: European Nationalism

To the surprise of no one, Marine Le Pen has failed for the second time to make even a close-run thing of the second round of a French presidential election.  She won 41.4% of votes to her opponent’s 58.6%, on a turnout of 72% (against 74.6% in 2017).  The popular vote was 13,297,760 to 18,779,641.  The result does represent a long step forward from 2017, when Le Pen won only a third of the second-round ballot. 

On that calculation she cut the deficit very nearly in half (the easier half to persuade, of course).  The reality is a little worse than that.  Billed as an election for those one least dislikes, we now have definite proof that, allowing for a share of those who voted in 2017 but not this time, no more than four in ten French voters can be persuaded to support Le Pen.  Only 13% of non-nationalists (“nationalist” in this context meaning those who had voted a fortnight ago for Le Pen + Zemmour) felt able to switch to her.  And this after all the enormous efforts she has made to explain herself as something other than the Establishment media’s hate-object.  Even as the EU-neutral, Islam-accepting cat-lady of French politics she could not threaten a totally unloved sitting president.  It is another reminder for nationalists, were any reminder needed, how very difficult it is to break through in any systemically liberal polity.

One should also note that Le Pen did not always help herself during her campaign.  In the presidential debate last week she took the bad decision to focus on policy detail, which is Macron’s managerialist strength, not hers, and let him off the hook of his own unpopularity.  Obviously, she wanted to project competence.  But she projected his competence.  She also confused the voters by suddenly declaring that the lovable and by no means toxic cat-lady would ban the Muslim veil in public.  It didn’t need saying.  Mixed-messaging is never a good thing.  Then, too, she had bad luck in her timing with the war in Ukraine and her past approval of Vladimir Putin (basically tended for consenting to provide RN with banking facilities when no French bank would do so).  Finally, there was the very odd timing from Brussels of the launch of an investigation into fraud dating back before the last presidential election.  I don’t know how damaging that really was.  As an attempt to manipulate the election it could hardly have been more blatant.  Perhaps Brussels was more damaged by it than Le Pen.  Perhaps she actually gained votes just on the basis of the general disgust.  But all that said, these issues are petty and narrowly political.  It is difficult to believe that any of them could have made the difference for Macron.  His advantage was always secure.

Rather, the constant electoral problem for nationalism is that its grand cause is national and existential but the concerns of the majority of voters are stubbornly personal and economic; and here Le Pen really tried to break the mould.  She alighted on the rapidly rising cost of living at the beginning of her campaign, and pushed it throughout.  Many commentators praised her political shrewdness, acknowledging that any treasure trove of votes was going to be found on the left.  They obviously expected to see a pay-off for her at the polling station.  She obviously expected to see it.  But nothing very much was forthcoming.  One wonders whether something more than a me-too expression of solidarité with the policy-goals of the left and some communitarian empathie with those left behind by Macron is required.  In the absence of a complete economic vision will such offerings always be seen as opportunistic?  In the end, do voters look to nationalism for a bit of tax relief?

All this raises the vexing question of where French nationalism goes from here.  There will very likely need to be a self-critical assessment of the performance of Rassemblement National in the legislative elections scheduled for 12th and 19th June.  OK, Zemmour’s alternative Reconquête!, even with Marion Maréchal on board, may be unlikely to achieve much of an impact itself seat-wise.  But it could make the always problematic task of election difficult for RN candidates, and not just this June.  How can nationalism cut through if it is outflanked on the issue of Islam on the right by an essentially conservative party and out-flanked on economic issues on the left by an essentially Corbynist party?
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Personally, I suspect that, after his creditable performance in the first round of the presidential election, the old-left ideological warrior Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) will harvest much of the anti-Macron sentiment in June.  There is a strong possibility that the French, having elected the little man because they thought they had to, will delight in denying him the capacity to form a government in the legislature.  La France Insoumise is not a formal party, and is a classic vessel for temporary political protest.  It is a broad church of the narrow left consisting of supporters’ groups and small committees campaigning for “ecosocialism”.  One assumes that this oddity is for unhinged CO2 obsessives whose interest in the environment very oddly and abruptly curtails itself when the subject of population growth due to immigration pops up.  The égalité of Africans and Arabs is obviously much too pressing to allow ideological consistency to get in the way.

Accordingly, Mélenchon greeted Le Pen’s defeat (rather than Macron’s victory) with the words, “It’s very good news for the unity of our people,” which, naturally, demonstrates the customary pig-headed refusal to acknowledge who the French are and who they are not.  Over 7 million people - a fifth of the total vote - actually put a cross against Mélenchon’s name in the first round of the presidentials.  La France Incurable might have been more accurate.

As for Le Pen, she seems set on fighting on.  But what can she do that she has not already done to untie the gossamer bindings of her supposed toxicity?  Five years ago she was able to respond to other presidential candidate’s tough election-talk on immigration by saying, “Why vote for a fake when you can vote for the real thing.”  Now she has come to the point where her opponents can invert that and say the same of her centrism.  Of course, it’s true that ordinarily the centre is the ground an election winner must occupy.  It is where the most votes are.  It is where the most floating votes are. In addition, in France the traditional parties of power - the Gaullists and the Socialists - are dying.  The latter is effectively dead already.  The centre is eminently contestable.  But the gods of political change do not seem to be with Le Pen.  She sacrificed her authenticity to be their beneficiary.  It is difficult to see any real identity now, or much creative energy, in RN.  Perhaps Le Pen and her party have simply been around too long.  Perhaps RN will now fall victim to the same malaise as the Gaullists and the Socialists, and Marion will inherit the tricolour of Delacroix’ revolutionary Marianne.

Yesterday the UN General Council voted by the required two-thirds majority to exclude the Russian Federation from the UN Human Rights Council.  This morning the Kremlin’s reply landed at a train station in the Donbas - not one missile but two, and not a single-warhead but cluster munitions.  Initial reports say thirty people were killed on the spot, and a further hundred injured.  It is totally apparent from the personal items and clothing strewn about the place that this was not a military target.  The local mayor has stated that there were some 4,000 civilians at the station at the time.  The strikes were a perfectly clear statement to the effect that the Kremlin doesn’t give a damn about the safety and human rights of the people of the Donbas, never gave a damn about the safety and human rights of the people of the Donbas, and will break any and every moral boundary it pleases.  Even to make a bitchy political point.

One awaits the first Western nationalist to explain that if only the UN General Council hadn’t been so aggressive in pushing Putin to the limits, those refugees might still be alive.

Well, three days ago the Spectator carried a piece on the massacre in Bucha.  It referred to a remarkable article which had appeared in the state-owned, Russian-language news service RIA Novosti.  The Spectator article was written by one-time resident in Putin’s fiefdom Christopher Booth.  It set out the future of endless de-Nazification for Ukrainians in the Donbas and the south who cannot free themselves from Russian occupation and control.  Of the Novosti article it says:

It speaks in detail of how Russia might achieve the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine – the first stated aim of the invasion.

The piece comes just as the Kremlin would have us believe that the goals of the so-called ‘special military operation’ have been recalibrated, and perhaps all will end in some sort of queasy compromise in the east of the country. In case you have fallen for this idea, here’s a quote from the RIA Novosti article in question:

“Apart from the Ukrainian leadership, a substantial part of the population is also guilty of being passively Nazi, and facilitators of Nazism. They supported the Nazi regime and urged it forward… The further denazification of the population will require re-training through ideological repression and fierce censorship, not only in the political sphere but also in the sphere of culture and education.”

The author goes on to say: ‘History teaches us that Ukraine cannot exist as a nation state’. Note – this was written less than a week ago. He recommends further that Ukrainian school textbooks be confiscated; that the population should be compelled to denounce one another for the greater good; that memorials to Russian soldiers should be erected to commemorate the war against Ukrainian fascism; and that ‘anti-Nazi’ commissions should be established in what remains of the country for at least 25 years.

So, a Russian propagandist writing in a state-owned Russian publication, giving advice that cannot be at odds with Kremlin thinking, is seeking a “de-Nazification” that is not at all restricted to the Azov Battalions but is code for a population-wide cleansing of “guilt”.  This is precisely how the horrors of the Soviet Union proceeded.  It explains what a survivor of Bucha told the Western media, namely, that the Russian soldiers were demanding where “the Nazis” were and, in some cases, stripping villagers in search of incriminating tattoos.  Some of this behaviour has been ascribed to Chechens.  But it is also ordinary Russian soldiers ordinarily brutalising and murdering people of their own accord, because such behaviour is, if not ordered, more or less given licence from above.  Russian military operations have been that way in Chechnya and in Syria.

So we come to the matter of support among Western nationalists for Putin and the Russian military.  For years now I’ve been referring to the borderline personality types who populate our world.  These are people who are unable to “fit in” with the general Mind.  But they are perfectly able to withstand all the hatreds that are visited upon nationalism, rather like bacteria in hospitals that survive the action of chemical cleaners.  Our politics, therefore, is a natural home for these people.  On the Spectator thread there was an explanatory comment by someone named Venk (evidently not a nationalist himself) which I found relevant:

It puzzled me too until I realized that their hatred for western elites has twisted their worldview. They loathe our leadership class and they admire Putin because he’s a strong-man alternative to woke green-obsessed liberal western elites. Unfortunately, they lack common sense and moderation, so they adopt a “see no evil” approach.

If the western media says it; it must be a lie. If Putin’s propagandists say it; it must be true. If Putin’s forces do something obviously evil, it must be a western lie or a justified action given the circumstances. It’s a bit like the trait psychologists call splitting in people with Borderline Personality Disorder.

They remind me a little of the Cambridge Five, upper class communists who hated our system so much they sided with the enemy. They managed to convince themselves that the USSR was the solution to Western shortcomings, and they either ignored evidence to the contrary or explained it away as a necessary evil on the path to the greater good.

I don’t think it’s a phenomenon that can be attributed to the left or the right, but to certain personality types who can’t process complex realities or balance the good and bad in any scenario.

One would hope that the missile strikes on Kramatorsk train station might cause some of these folk to think again.  But for many, I think, the itch to attack “the West” and “the Jews” will be just too powerful, and they will go on, like the Russian propagandist who apparently wants the gulags back for the next twenty-five years, giving voice to the same certainties in fulfilment of the same emotional needs.

This is an essay written for PA’s site.  It is a first attempt to shift British nationalism towards a genuine nationalism of ethnicity ...

In a word: ethnic.  In this primer I will set out a basic form of ethnic nationalism that British nationalists could create and promulgate so that we may yet make a philosophically and politically seriously assault on the citadel of Western elitism and political power, as these now operate in our home.  I will explain the great necessity but also the great difficulty of that task, and I will appeal to all nationalists to search their heart on the question, and to help in so much as they are able.

BASE ASSUMPTIONS

1. Our people are dying by the hand of our own political class and the corporate and banking interests which they serve.  It is, then, not a natural death, or an inevitable outcome of jet travel and the will of poor peoples around the world to improve their lives.  It is not a political mistake, or an act of stupendous negligence.  It is not a “pay-back” from history.  It is a political assassination, and the assassins know precisely what they are doing, and want to do it.  It is their chosen course for us.  It is a true genocide by Article 2 (c) of the 1948 Convention, for which they confidently expect not to have to answer.

The two principal methods the assassins employ are:

a) Endless, colonising and replacing migration of populations from elsewhere in the world.

b) Psychological warfare, also known as culture war, on the natural role and character of Man and Woman, and on our ethnic person.

But beneath these lies an array of deep-seated causalities acting upon us from the history of events and from the history of ideas, the sum of which presses us to the inevitable conclusion that “a serious assault on the citadel of Western elitism and political power” must mean a revolution on no mean scale.  A simple change to national politics alone will, in the longer term, be constrained and, finally, erased by the continuing effect of these foundational forces.  Many, and quite possibly all of them, have to be swept away, too.

The following chart of these forces, including those striving for control of the future of all humanity, supplies a relational form to them, be they historical or historiographical, or even futuristic!  I am still astonished, when I gaze at the totality of it, at just how much harm for our precious people there is in this world.  Heaven knows, there is room for some good.

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Any novel and genuine politics of change must possess a set of interlocking core principles derived from a theory of Man’s reduced condition and a countering and inspiring vision of what he properly is.  That latter must be reflected in the ultimate value advanced by these politics, and the whole must be eminently communicable, indeed politically virulent; and for that people have to know that it is true.  One shortfall in any of these respects and historical purchase will not be possible, even when the prevailing system is grown stale and unproductive, and the people yearn for a relevant and fresh, hopeful way forward.

So poorly mapped out is ethnic nationalism, so poorly has it been served by thinking nationalists, and so unsympathetically, oftimes deceitfully, by liberal academics, that all three of these necessities - structure, ultimate value, and truth - are scarcely addressed at all in any formal sense.  Properly resolved they would advance our nationalism considerably towards becoming the holistic and original philosophy we desire it to be. 

But they are not the only unresolved issues.  The problem of becoming, or human purpose, and the problem of the individual and his freedom also cast a long shadow, as does the problem of the sheer scale of the revolutionary endeavour.  With all that in mind, then, we will now try to make some progress, or at least some useful observations, commencing in this essay with the problems of structure and of becoming.  Value, truth, and the individual must await a part four, and even five.

The problem of structure

As explained previously in this series, we routinely profess ourselves to be ethnic nationalists, espousers of a communicable philosophy.  Really, though, the most that can be said of us is that we are nativists.  Nativism at least has a structure to it.  It is defensive and survivalist.  It is the politics of the place of arising ... home, the source of the people, the parent of their distinctiveness.  It is important.  But it can never rise to the station of a positive, organising system for living ... never get beyond defence of the people’s life and land.

Descriptively, a nationalism of ethnicity must be holistic, naturalistic, existential, authenticising, universal (in the sense of true of all peoples), defensive before it is expansive, and preserving before it is conserving.  As the political expression of the native principle, it is the politics of ethnic genesis on the soil and so of the natural right ... the native right ... to defend kind and home.  It is, then, the active politics of genetic interests, of the kin relation.  As the politics of all settled peoples it is the politics of peace and the complete antidote to liberalism’s post-Christian and anti-European universalism.  It is the politics of consciousness of being.  It is the politics of the authentic in us individually and, therefore, collectively, because consciousness in a people, like natural wisdom in a crowd, is accreting. 

But what are the principles underpinning all this?  How do they articulate socially?  The following (tentatively proposed) structural scheme may take things forward:

It exhibits a rather extensive collection of base principles and, in the upper range, a row of states leading to triads of active processes.  All are arrayed across three distinct but interlocking dynamics, shown here as rising columns.

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Yesterday, after trailing his skirts for several months, Eric Zemmour finally announced his candidature for next April’s French presidential election.  He did so with a brilliantly crafted speech, which I reproduce below.

Nationalists, meanwhile ... real ones ... have likely already discounted the possibility that a Jewish anti-Islamist and culturist would, if elected, deliver a nationalist outcome.  Yes, he says “The Third Worldization of our country and our people impoverishes it as much as it disrupts it, ruins it as much as it torments it.”  But he also says, “So that the French will feel at home again and so that the latest arrivals assimilate to their culture and appropriate their history.”

Then there is much confusion caused by his adoption of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement terminology (which Marine Le Pen has not taken up).  Does that signify adoption of the theory as such?  Is he at all hostile to non-Muslim foreignisation, if those foreigners integrate culturally?  Yes, he says “we will not allow ourselves to be replaced”.  Yes, he speaks of “the minorities who never stop tyrannizing the majority”, but is he speaking only of Muslims, Islam and jihad?

The one certainty is that his language and his candidacy will push the future of the true French to the centre of the campaign, and force the traitor-parties to speak of the one thing of which they are most afraid.  If, as seems possible, Zemmour beats Le Pen and the other challengers to proceed to the second round against Macron (presumeably), the Great Question of nationalism is very likely to become the great question of French politics, win or lose.  That much this man can do for true nationalists.

Here is his speech:

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I would like to be able to say that, finally, one of us has been granted access to the golden temple of the respectable, and we’re going mainstream, baby.  But not yet.  Not quite.  James Delingpole, “libertarian-conservative” and freedom junkie though he is, hasn’t been entirely respectable himself for a few years now.  He is too much the enfant terrible of climate scepticism - a role he has honourably discharged for a dozen years - and, latterly as executive editor of Breitbart London, far too far right, doncha know.  His discovery of Davos and The Great Re-Set has, of course, tipped him over into Tin-Foil World, from which there is no coming back.  James is lost to liberal reason and the literati dinner party circuit forever.  He is about 40% “there”, from a nationalist perspective.  But one should say that none of us are sufficiently informed to be more than, say, 60% or 65% of the way, and actually none of us really knows what 100% would be, because the boundaries keep expanding.  Who knew anything very much about the Re-Set even two years ago.

Anyway, James gave a very kind and entertaining hearing to Morgoth, not diving too deep because that’s not the way these interviews work, but deep enough to satisfy.  A lot of typically Morgothian bases were covered ... Tolkien, Spengler (he was good on Spengler), lots of cultural analysis and analysis of the “power” in power elitism, the left, the Re-Set, the football.  Morgoth acquitted himself well and demonstrated that a Northumbrian bloke from a building site can parley with as much intellectual authority as anyone.  As James said, he stood up his arguments.

There was one slightly scary moment when Morgoth mentioned the tribe, and one could see James pondering his Breitbart earner.  There was one other moment when James just possibly revealed a liberal paternalist’s abiding contempt for nationalism; but it passed quickly.  But that aside, it was a convivial chat about hugely important matters, and I enjoyed it.  I just wish that the doors to the wider world would start to open now; but I suspect that in the present febrile climate they are probably closing on James too.

You can listen to the interview, all 1 hour and 2 mins of it, here:

https://odysee.com/@JamesDelingpoleChannel:0/morgoth:d

Today the Telegraph reported on an academic paper commending a new lexicography of race and ethnicity in order to combat very, very naughty racist thoughts by white men:

Dr Ewan Birney, deputy director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire, is also a co-author of the article.

He explains that beyond dropping Caucasian, other terms should also be avoided, including ethnicity labels - such as “Native American”, “Hispanic” and “White Irish” - and cultural terms such as “European”.

Dr Birney and his colleagues advocate for scientists to replace these commonly used words and phrases with more complex language, based around a two-step genetic analysis.

As a result, he says this more technical language would see the label of “European” replaced with “The European-associated PCA cluster, which aims to minimise variation in non-genetic factors and genetic factors”.

Dr Birney is actually Prof Birney, and as well as holding other positions in the gene biz he is a co-director of the European Bioinfomatics Institute, the “home for big data in biology”.  Oddly, this rather large and, no doubt, exceedingly well-funded organisation does know what race is when it needs to:

As Europe’s premier centre for bioinformatics, our commitment to diversity and inclusion is critical to our success in delivering excellence in science. As a global organisation with employees from 80+ nationalities we encourage and empower our employees to be their authentic selves at work, embracing the unique combination of culture, race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, physical or mental ability and work-life situations.

Along with himself, Prof Birney credits five colleagues with the writing of the paper, which is titled “The language of race, ethnicity, and ancestry in human genetic research”.  They set out their case thus:

In the case of human genetics (by which we mean the genetic study of human biology and disease) this often involves terminology inherited from anthropology and population genetics, both of which have evolved significantly in recent years. Both fields now firmly reject longstanding ideas of race as a meaningful biological category and labels which were founded in racist perspectives of the 20th and preceding centuries. For example, it is now clear that while humans vary genetically, there is no natural or inherent categorization of human genetic diversity at any global scale. The genetic structures we find are tangled and complex, reflecting our history of worldwide migration, population divergence and admixture, both ancient and recent. While not without consequence for human traits, genetic ancestry and diversity are poorly reflected in the range of anatomical features used in older studies that sought to categorize individuals and groups, features such as pigmentation and cranial or post-cranial morphology. Hence, the racial and ethnographic labels used in such historical studies, and more fundamentally their categorizing approach, have little relevance for understanding human population genetics. Furthermore, the consequences of misunderstanding and misusing these categories, and the terms associated with them, are far from neutral: science, society and politics have always been inherently connected.

As geneticists, we believe that there is an increasing need to address one of the more uncomfortable aspects of this connection, where in the words of American Society of Human Genetics “the invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist” [1]. As the source of evidence which some ideologues misrepresent to fit their views of biology and society, the human genetics community has an obligation to revisit and, where possible, change its language to be both more accurate and less confusing or harmful in the public arena. In science, we always aim for precision in our language, but it is not feasible to completely eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding, wilful or otherwise.

Prof Birney also has a blog, which he has not used much, it must be said.  But his last but one post back in 2019 was titled “Race, genetics, and pseudo-science: an explainer”, and it explains that:

Racial categories, as most people understand them today, have some of their roots in the development of scientific thinking during only the last few centuries. As Europeans explored and colonised the world, thinkers, philosophers and scientists from those countries attempted to apply taxonomic structures to the people that they encountered, and though these attempts were many and varied, they typically reflected sharp geographic boundaries, and obvious physical characteristics, such as pigmentation and basic morphology – that is to say, what people look like. Research in the 20th century found that the crude categorisations used colloquially (black, white, East Asian etc.) were not reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation, meaning that differences and similarities in DNA between people did not perfectly match the traditional racial terms. The conclusion drawn from this observation is that race is therefore a socially constructed system, where we effectively agree on these terms, rather than their existing as essential or objective biological categories.

Some people claim that the exquisitely detailed picture of human variation that we can now obtain by sequencing whole genomes contradicts this. Recent studies, they argue, actually show that the old notions of races as biological categories were basically correct in the first place. As evidence for this they often point to the images produced by analyses in studies that seem to show natural clustering of humans into broadly continental groups based on their DNA. But these claims misinterpret and misrepresent the methods and results of this type of research. Populations do show both genetic and physical differences, but the analyses that are cited as evidence for the concept of race as a biological category actually undermine it.

Denying race is a form of professional lying, which is invariably undertaken by otherwise educated people “because racism”.  Prof Birney could as easily prove the taxonomic validity of race as disprove it - a fact my good friend John Standing thought he might demonstrate to the anti-racist Prof by way of some emailed questions, as follows:

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The following short article marks the close of my efforts to bring PA to seriousness.  I have said what I wanted to say.  There is no point in going on saying it.  Whether it will have any effect over the time remaining to PA itself, before it is proscribed, remains to be seen.  Where responsible and intelligent political advocacy for our people will come from, heaven knows.

Last week the Sweden Democrats announced that three of the four conservative opposition parties in the Swedish parliament were talking to them about entering a power-sharing arrangement after the September 2022 general election.  It signalled an end to the long-running consensus among mainstream conservatives that they would never cooperate with Jimmie Åkesson’s party.  Given the current unpopularity of prime minister Stefan Löfven’s Social Democrat government, it is entirely likely that the Swedish will follow their neighbours south of The Öresund in accepting the principle of a nationalist component to government.

Of course, the road to electoral relevance is never the same in any two European homelands, and nowhere is it bound to produce unending success.  Political fortunes wax and wane.  In Denmark, for instance, the experiment with nationalism in government has lasted only one parliament so far, between 2015 and 2019.  But if the Danish People’s Party can maintain its electoral relevance it may return; and that is as much as can be asked at this very dark moment.

The ideological keys to electoral relevance are pragmatism and moderation.  By their nature, democracies tend, over time, to encourage all serious political parties to moderate to the prevailing political consensus just to become and remain relevant.  In our time in our benighted country the weight of national security laws and the manner in which they are worked by the security apparatus of the state also place an absolute obligation on politically ambitious nationalists to follow the same path.  It’s not as if there is a real choice.  So the question, really, is how, not if; and for starters the how is to switch out of the negativity and reaction which has characterised the nationalist past ... the racism, the anti-Islamism, the WW2 guff, the anti-Semitism, the white nationalism and alt-rightism, and all the rest.  Yes, our people have the right in Nature to struggle to exist in this world, and we can advocate for it.  We can advocate for respect from government.  We can advocate for fairness and freedom.  We can prosecute our right under constitutional law and human rights law to come together and choose our destiny, if we so wish.  None of that changes, and in Sweden that coming together is a key ... perhaps the key ... nationalist appeal.  The front page of the party’s website reads “Välkommen till folkrörelsen”.  It means: welcome to the popular movement. 

The party’s wiki page opens with the following:

The Sweden Democrats or Swedish Democrats (Swedish: Sverigedemokraterna, SD) is a nationalist and right-wing populist political party in Sweden founded in 1988. The party describes itself as social conservative with a nationalist foundation. The party has been variously characterised by academics, political commentators and the media as national-conservative, anti-immigration, eurosceptic or far-right. Jimmie Åkesson has been party leader since 2005.

The party originally had its roots in Swedish fascism and white nationalism, but began distancing itself from its past during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Under the leadership of Jimmie Åkesson, the SD underwent a process of reform by expelling hard-line members and moderating its platform. Today, the Sweden Democrats officially reject both fascism and Nazism.

That, or something very like that, is how the Tyndall-esque movement we, in many respects, still are can develop into a real and responsible servant of our people’s life-cause.  It’s no great mystery.  Yes, we have to change mightily to do it.  But it’s not as if we have a choice.  It’s not as if those who would argue otherwise have any positive and hopeful, patriotic alternative.