America and demos, Conservatism and ethnos

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 10 September 2006 23:58.

Daedalus - he of The Phora, Friedrich’s Civic Platform, the soon to be Phora blog and possibly more besides - made some interesting historical comments about Conservatism in America on JJR’s “Stomp Israel” post. In consideration of those comments I thought it might be interesting to (somewhat briefly) explore the metapolitics expressed by modern America and to contrast these with the essence of the most necessary alternative.

The central point to which all else returns is this: America, a land of people who forsook their homes, cannot but visit upon the old world its own cultural caesura and, in so doing, cannot but sever the people from their roots.

Daedalus made the point, with which I wholly agree, that American politics appends to neoliberalism the title of Conservatism. Actually, American neoliberalism is the perfect progeny of the Enlightenment and as much a product of the left, in the general sense, as was Marxism-Leninism. But whereas Marxism-Leninism dominated the will of the people, it never took upon itself the task of destroying their cultural specificity. America does precisely that, replicating its mess of consumerism, economism and individualism throughout its vast and expanding hegemon.

Quite obviously, one cannot expect consumerism, economism and individualism to mesh with high culture or common tradition. But the harm neoliberalism causes goes far beyond that. Neoliberalism offers Man nothing more organic or life-affirming than open markets and free choice. The

effect

of these vulgar and fatally thin agents is to “free” men not to be fully human, as liberals of all stripes suppose, but to be shorn of history and place and the connective tissues of being these things propagate. In destroying cultural specificity neoliberalism hacks at the roots of the individual man and of the ethnos, and only human lightness and anomie are left at the end of that rainbow.

Neoliberalism, then, is a deeply negative force, in a leftist sense transforming European ethnos everywhere into post-Revolutionary American demos. How does this equate to Conservatism, as the entire political world wants us to suppose it does?

It doesn’t.

I have not made the direct claim in my previous scribblings at MR about Conservatism. But I will do so now … a Conservative zeitgeist can only refer to the collective body of the ethnos, with all its natural heirarchical characteristics. It is impossible for the simple tenets that came into focus in the first Ministry of Pitt the Younger to hold in conditions of the egalitarian demos. They did not do so after 1832 and they could not do so today. American neoliberalism is not and can never be Conservative.

All this, of course, is just another way of saying that we are living in a leftist age led by America (whose public relations triumph has been to make us believe that she stands to the right of the Marxist-Leninist monstrosity she finally beat down in 1989). The liberal zeitgeist is irredeemable. Indeed, ethnos cannot be redeemed from demos unless the zeitgeist allows for it. The last attempt to produce such a zeitgeist from scratch in Europe was made in Italy and Germany during the 1920’s and 30’s. White nationalists and Conservative loyalists alike would do well to reflect on that and on the true enormity of their task. For a little activism here and lobbying there, a court case or two and, finally, access to that long-awaited funding will not do it.

Tags: Political Philosophy

Comments:

Posted by Daedalus on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 03:09 | #

I mostly agree, but that is not the whole story, so I will elaborate where you left off. First, America has not always been the vulgar, raceless, neoliberal state that it is today. The U.S. once had a strong, vigorous tradition of racial nationalism, especially in the South and West, that persisted from the seventeenth century right down to the mid-twentieth century, and in many places still exists. I’m not aware of any other Western country where race has been so closely associated with nationalism. Even the Third Reich never came close to reproducing the elaborate racial caste system of the Jim Crow South. Hitler’s fantasy about ethnic cleansing and colonization in Eastern Europe was a reality in the American Southeast where Indians were deported to Oklahoma (a concentration camp that became a state) during the early nineteenth century. The Mexican War and Texas War of Independence were explicitly defined as race wars at the time, as the Spanish-American War was later to a lesser extent. For centuries, America’s equally vigorous tradition of racial nationalism was able to moderate and balance its commitment to civic nationalism. Indeed, many Americans had convinced themselves by the mid-nineteenth century that blacks were a seperate species altogether. See Josiah Nott’s Types of Mankind for more on that.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that the U.S. was founded as a republic, not as a liberal democracy. The Founders of the United States were republicans. This is a crucial point. Republican political theory diverges from liberalism in several crucial ways. The U.S. Constitution was not designed with the object of advancing democracy in mind. On the contrary, the Founders were highly suspicious of democracy (Hamilton originally wanted a monarchy), and the U.S. Constitution thwarts democracy through all sorts of ingenious mechanisms: super majorities to pass constitutional amendments, appointment of Supreme Court justices by the president, election of senators by state legislatures, the electoral college, and so on. The Federalists under Hamilton and Adams would later go on to hold democracy in utter contempt during the 1790s.

It was the misfortune of republicanism to be committed to ideals which could so easily be coopted by liberal insurgents. Liberty, for example, once meant a “capacity for self government,” not “the absence of the initation of force.” This was the preserve the enlightened and cultivated few who could become independent and self-governing individuals through education and the rigorous cultivation of virtue. Liberty was not the mere absence of restraint, or anarchy. Rather, liberty was the product of restraint and the preserve of the minority. Obviously women, children, nonwhites, and white men without property were dependents deficient in reason and were thus not accorded voting rights as a consequence. It was John Stuart Mill who would later redefine liberty as the absence of the initiation of force in the mid-nineteenth century.

Similarly, equality originally meant nothing more than citizens having the same civil rights as citizens of the republic; the right to marry, acquire property, enter into contracts and so forth. There used to be a distinction between “civil rights,” “political rights,” and “social rights” that has been largely forgotten. For example, women were equally citizens, but they didn’t have the same political and social rights as males. The battle over social equality in the South was successfully redefined as a conflict over civil rights when it was nothing of the sort.

Liberals takes the individual as their essential starting part whereas republicans take a more corporate view and assume man is naturally a social being. Indeed, the American ideal was originally a republican one with a strongly communitarian ethos: an enlightened elite would steward the ship of state and promote the general welfare while protecting individual liberty. The American Founders rejected liberal economics in favor of neo-mercantilism. They also frowned upon political parties which they associated with factionalism and found deeply distasteful. Adams was especially vitrolic on this point.

Ultimately, the American project was the victim of its own success. Economic prosperity empowered commercial interests which over the years steadily transformed the great white republic into the vulgar raceless mobocracy of our times.

Posted by Boris on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 03:24 | #

Your last sentence reflets our dim plight. Imagen going against the might of organized jewry worldwide, IMO our most direct and grave threat. And then sprinkle in arab rebelions which occur for no other reason than US policy towards Israel and against Arabs and one has two fronts. Plus the one at home it makes three fronts. I know of no civilazation which succesfully fended off three fronts, two maybe but not three. Something must give or this is a war we cannot win.

Posted by JJR Apologist on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 04:09 | #

reflect on that and on the true enormity of their task

That requires everyone understanding: 1) we are under foreign occupation by an International Nation; 2) this occupying power has every intention of maintaining hegemony, which requires irretrievably weakening the native ethnic group—a strategy they cannot deviate from because of their minority status and the enormity of crimes they are guilty of (a dwarf does not half-strangle a giant; he finishes the job or perishes once the giant regains his breath and is in a state to retaliate for the treachery); 3) that despite their numerical inferiority, they possess every implement that would, if things continue along the current path, result in their final victory. Once the native race is fragmented the war is *forever lost*. 4) that the present state is of full-spectrum route where the enemy is imposing his will—think French armies on May 30, 1940.

Posted by Boris on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 04:55 | #

Religious indoctrination is IMO an important component of furthering our enemies agenda. What irony!!!!! Criteria that was held as true for almost TWO millenia is now being disregarded as ‘obsolete’. Where are this nut-crackers learning their religion from anyways?

Posted by PatrickZ on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:23 | #

I’d rather live in democracy-with a White majority of course-than live in a society ruled by southern gentleman with an apetite for slavery and brutal wage slavery.

Patrick

Posted by PatrickZ on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:30 | #

The choice between being ruled over by either by Southern economic reactionaries and Northern economic reactionaries is a false choice. There are other options for ordinary White folk such as: having ordinary White folks in state legislatures and the congress.

Partrick

Posted by Amalek on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:07 | #

Pre-war writers such as Spengler, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard and Julius Evola are often mocked for their fears that the North European peoples were in danger of extinction. They feared that the civilisation Northern Europeans had spread across the earth could not be inherited and sustained by other races whose larger numbers were largely facilitated by our medicine.

In the post-WW2 climate of revulsion against eugenics, such arguments were associated with genocidal counter-revolution and stigmatised as, at best, selfish and mean-spirited. The ‘no such thing as race’ school (Ashley Montagu, Franz Boas, Julian Huxley etc) propounded, at least implicitly, that ‘culture’ sufficed as a transmission belt for what was worth preserving of the white man’s civilisation. This has trickled down to politicians and journalists in the regnant ideology of colour-blindness. It is what John Derbyshire has identified as the presumption, rarely spelt out but almost uncontradictable in polite society, that traits and abilities are distributed randomly across homo sapiens and that subspeciation applies only to superficies: ‘We’re all the same except for the colour of our skin’.

Patrick Buchanan has at last hurled defiance of this ‘axiom of equality’ into the pool of mass public opinion in his new book ‘State of Emergency’, wherein he demands to know on what grounds we can assume that western civ can be operated and improved by Indians, Japanese or Mexicans—let alone negroes and Arabs.

In so doing Buchanan is also defying the linked sentimentalism about the USA being a ‘propositional nation’: intended from the outset as a salad bowl for an infinitely large quantity and variety of human ingredients. Scotch Irish by descent, pragmatic as a paleocon finds it easier to be (conservatism being more a matter of temperament, pace GuessedWorker, than principles or policies) Buchanan looks at examples of actually existing and collapsing multiracial nations; he queries if such shambolic constructs can shoulder the white man’s burden and carry it further. Buchanan knows that despite the rhetoric of rebellion and Enlightenment, the original USA would not have formed and held together in war and peace had it not been governed largely by men who shared not only values and folkways and economic interests but blood.

The republic which was murdered by Abraham Lincoln was not, Declarations and proclamations apart, so very different from the United Kingdom of the Georges—except that the former colonies saw themselves as sovereignties and required a looser central control than did Ireland and Scotland. The presidency, a glorified committee chairmanship, was an 18th century constitutional monarchy with time limits and no right to name a successor; but like George III, Mr President is not required to recruit his cabinet from the legislative branch, and is subject to the ukases of judges in the same manner as the widely admired post-1688 separation of powers was functioning in the UK, to make it the world’s most modern, fastest growing and expanding power at the time.

Traces of the pre-1860 republic are fast vanishing from the USA’s statecraft as the ageing, toiling would-be hegemon surrenders to the militarising and cowing of civil society. The government has been neo-Jacobinised by false conservatives to frighten a naturally isolationist citizenry into wearily assenting to foreign crusades and domestic lockdown. This is happening under false pretences (“Islamofascism”) but also under the gun of a genuine, if not military, danger.

Rising Far Eastern powers will challenge America’s post-1945 supremacy more subtly and vigorously than the communist USSR ever could. Like other empires- and lust for conquest raised its ugly head in America as early as the 1830s- the country is being brought down by having to admit subjugated aliens within the gates. Civis Americanus sum. Not just Mexican illegals, but all the incompatible elements that were decanted into the northern European, Anglocentric polity after the War between the States, the slaves who should have shipped out after it, and the hordes who poured in after 1965… all curdle the mix.

To incorporate them into nationhood wthout communitarian violence, America had to keep upping the ‘democratic’ ante and deepending the pork barrel, while dismantling its federalism and original republican ideals. The cant of universal rights had to console the imported for their true status as toilers for a plutocratic, internationally minded ruling class which has never been so shameless in rewarding itself while its helots tramp round the hamster-wheel of unsatisfying, debt-financed hedonism and long working hours. The plutocrats lurk behind electronic gates, shielded from the consequences of their reckless racial adulterations.

Maybe the shrinking white majority will awaken in time and find some way either of slowing its marginalisation or of forming a nation-sized stockade within North America. But the USA is caught on the horns of its own rhetoric. Ever since 1776, with increasingly goofy and self-destructive sincerity, the Founders and their descendants have been telling the incomers how welcome they are and how easily they’ll fit in. With other whites, it worked after a fashion, as long as foreign enemies could be found to keep the country together under arms and orders. With blacks, colour-blindness and individual opportunity never clicked; they’re not like that. With browns, the incomers don’t even want to fit in. So it’s a tough one.

Posted by Al Ross on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:33 | #

Every White American child should be catechized on Amalek’s tour-de-force post as a necessary condition of high-school graduation.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:49 | #

“Amalek’s tour-de-force post” (—Al Ross)

Agreed. What a first-rate post by Amalek!

Posted by On Holliday on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:05 | #

“Agreed. What a first-rate post by Amalek!”

Yes, indeed. Vintage Majority Rights material.

Posted by Amalek on Tue, 12 Sep 2006 17:02 | #

Thanks, amigos. I am humbled (not for long, though- heh heh heh).

Posted by Calvin on Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:13 | #

Well done Amalek! That’s one of the best posts I’ve read here or anywhere else.

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 13 Sep 2006 12:21 | #

The activist Jews who agitate so assiduously for the end of White America have engaged in their usual shell-game of bait and switch. They yammer home the point that resisting immigration, regardless of the ruinous non-traditional source, is “against your ideals” and thus constitutes that supreme contumely, ‘un-American’, and the smiling gulls accepted this alien appraisal of their country’s raison d’etre.

Posted by jlh on Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:35 | #

As a regular reader and occasional poster on this blog, I am finding Daedalus’ contributions most edifying. I eagerly search them out and look forward to more. Amalek’s comment is superb as well.