More.
Once again, a summary and an analysis of excerpts; follow the link to read the whole thing.
(a)
Ethnic nationalism
Ethnic nationalism treats the nation as an extended family. More than other nationalisms it most directly identifies and protects ethnic interests because it seeks to establish a relatively homogeneous, cohesive and independent society.
These motives have evolutionary origins in kinship. Cultural similarity mimics kinship, especially shared religion and historical memories and belief in descent from common ancestors. In racially diverse regions, ethnic genetic kinship is typically equivalent to that between first cousins. This makes the ethnic group a large store of each member’s distinctive genes.1 Ethnic kinship facilitates the spread and maintenance of ethnic nepotism, a weak but pervasive social tie.
That is the entire ethnic genetic interests paradigm in a nutshell.
Ethnic sentiment was hinted at and stated outright in early decisions to ban non-European immigration to Australia. Arthur Phillip, the first governor of the Sydney colony, refused the British Home Secretary’s proposal to obtain wives for the convicts by taking women from South Pacific islands. Instead he requested more female convicts be sent from England. Other early governors such as Sir Richard Bourke and Sir George Gipps took a similar stand against the importation of cheap Indian labour. This time the proposal came from squatters facing labour shortages. The Colonial Office concurred with the governors, citing the adverse effect on the wages of white labourers of introducing migrants of “an inferior and servile description”. Notice the concern with the working conditions of people of European descent in particular, not citizens in general. The first is an ethnic category, the second a civic.
Very good, No Asians. As opposed to Silk Road White nationalism that wants to see the West colonized by Asians and Whites as an enslaved subaltern caste.
…references to the blood of patriots, security of the homeland, portraying the nation as a family (“fatherland”, “motherland”), and so on. As already discussed, “nation” connotes ethnicity and as such is a biological, tribal concept. Such rhetoric has been shown to release patriotic motivation.3 The effect is so pronounced politicians use releaser ideas in order to gain legitimacy. They use terms such as “nation” and “community” and “sovereignty” and “borders” and “homeland defence” incessantly. But the rhetoric is out of kilter with their policies, and the discrepancy is becoming evident to a growingly cynical, distrustful electorate. A competent media or an aroused citizenry would make it difficult for mainstream politicians to use this rhetoric.
Because releaser ideas fit naturally with people’s evolved predispositions, they have greater effect with less effort. They are efficient. Ideas that fit less naturally do not release instinctive fixed action patterns but must be inculcated through repetition, which is costly. Unnatural ideas rely more on power, on monopoly of the media and education curricula. Perhaps that explains the globalist left’s intolerance – they do not tolerate any opposition because their ideas are unpalatable.
The question is how the globalist left obtained all that power to begin with. If their ideas are so unpalatable that they have to be maintained by force, but these ideas did not come into power by force…it is obvious we need some sort of explanatory analysis here.
Ethnic nationalism – and we can place racial nationalism here – is the purest of the forms of nationalism Salter discusses. It is explicit. It has as its ends the well-being of the ethny. This can be contrasted to liberal nationalism:
(b)
Liberal Nationalism
The notion of liberal nationalism might seem oxymoronic, especially to Americans, in an age when ‘liberal’ has come to mean leftist or socialist. Here the term’s original meaning is adopted, namely rational approaches to policy that emphasise individual rights and individual conscience.
Liberal philosophers inherited cultural leadership from traditionalists. Philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were reformers and patriots at the same time. They did not question the continuity of their people or civilisation. They were not afflicted with group guilt. Despite being reformers, by modern standards they were conservative in outlook. They represented continuity with traditional patriotism.
Mill posited a connection between national identity, homogeneity and democratic values. He concluded:
Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart […] One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies they choose to associate themselves.6
In Considerations Mill argued that representative institutions are “next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”. Democracy depends on society being educated and cohesive. As Mill thought that ethnic diversity reduced social cohesion, he concluded that diversity should be minimised. His argument concerned ethnicity, of which race is only one component. “The sympathies available for the purpose are those of race, language, religion, and, above all, of political institutions, as conducing most to a feeling of identity of political interest.”7
So, in liberal nationalism defense of the ethny is means , not ends. It is the means toward constructing a polity in which “liberal” values, such as individual rights, can be most effectively actualized. However:
Strictly speaking, liberal nationalism need contain no national sentiment at all, only policies for making society cohere within the frame of representative democracy and individual liberty. Policy might be ethnically selective but not necessarily the motives for advancing those policies. The starting point of Mill’s analysis of nationality (immigration, domestic affairs) is not loyalty to a particular tribe but universals of social behaviour, conflict avoidance, and civil liberties, especially freedom of speech and association.
Thus, we see the seeds of a problem in relying on liberal nationalism: it van be subverted toward policies hostile to the ethny in such policies can be formulated so as to ostensibly preserve the universal values prized by traditional liberal thinkers.
An example is Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s recent enunciation of libertarianism, which overlaps classical liberalism in emphasing the need for freedom from coercion and conflict. Hoppe concludes that immigration to Western societies should mainly consist of people descended from ethnic Europeans – “Western, white candidate immigrants” – not because of any ethnic preference but in the interests of social harmony, neighbourliness, and economic equity.16 He criticised the goal of white solidarity on the ground that many globalist elites are white.17
That last part is retarded on Hoppe’s part, and indicative of the weak analysis of libertarianism. Whites have genetic (and proximate) interests in the well-being of Whites, and hence White solidarity is useful. Are there free riders to such solidarity? Yes. Are there what I termed in the past “cross riders” to such solidarity – people who not only utilize the public good of solidarity without contributing to t but actually actively harm it? Yes, there are. But such types can be identified and they can be punished by withholding the benefits of such solidarity from them. White solidarity does not mean solidarity to every single White person on Earth, irrespective of their behavior. It instead implies solidarity to the group, in general, and those defectors from group solidarity of course should not derive benefits from it.
Genuine liberal nationalism is open to the idea that nationhood is beneficial for all peoples. This is another advantage over unregulated ethnic nationalism, which is prone to chauvinism, resulting in needless conflict. Universal nationalism has the potential to facilitate cooperation among parochialists against global centrists.
It is not clear to me why universal nationalism is not ethnic nationalism. Well, Salter uses the modifier “unregulated.” Very well. But regulated ethnic nationalism is not the same as liberal nationalism. One can directly and explicitly defend ethnic interests without descending into genocidal Hitlerism.
Universalism risks drifting too far from local interests. Stability of liberal nationalism as an ethnic strategy probably depends on more than perceived fairness, privacy and equality before the law. Hoppe’s rejection of ethnic solidarity misses the fact of ethnic kinship. Social divisions do not eliminate the interest we have in the welfare of our peoples. Genetically and civilisationally, class is false consciousness.
Well said.
For these reasons it is rational for ethnic nationalists to join in discussions of liberal nationalism, clarifying matters of fact and reasoning to yield outcomes more amenable to ethnic interests.
Or we can reject liberal nationalism and promote a regulated ethnoracial nationalism.
Salter then discusses the dead ends of economic, republican and civil forms of nationalism. You can read the details in his original ext. On civic nationalism (read: Trump), Salter states:
One problem with basing cohesion on values is that the process of political compromise inevitably reduces values to shallow slogans. As the conservative educationalist Kevin Donnelly explained, “even when there is agreement on what constitutes Australian or Western values, […] the list is so vacuous and all-embracing that it’s impossible to identify what makes such values special or unique”.26 Australians are meant to be united by such values as tolerance and inclusion and respecting different points of view. Particular religious and ethnic origins are not even named on the assumption that all cultures are equal.
The tenets of civic nationalism are not altogether new. Empires have universalised the head of state and expanded citizenship to win the loyalty of far-flung provinces. This was an innovation of the Romans, emulated by the British. In neither case did the patrician class believe that provincials were their equals but in both cases they used citizenship to gain loyalty based on equal treatment under the law. Equality included the legal right to migrate around the empire. Omnivorous citizenship in the Roman and British empires resulted in the mass migrations towards the metropolitan society.
Cynicism and shortsightedness are apparent in these imperial ideologies. Of relevance to Australia is the use of the equality doctrine by Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary in Whitehall, to block the colonies and the new Commonwealth from explicitly selecting ethnically European immigrants. The experience of Chinese immigration during the gold rushes showed that a European country situated beside the large populations of Asia could only retain its identity by systematically favouring European immigrants. But the British government wished to sign a naval agreement with Japan, for which purpose they needed to secure Japan’s favour. Chamberlain wrote to warn Australian leaders that the British government would advise the monarch to refuse the royal assent to any explicitly racial provision.
Note how the reverse is never true; for example, Japan never felt required to make racial concessions to Whites.
(f)
Reactive Nationalism
The reactive type has been influential. It will be briefly discussed, though it is not animated by a consistent ideology. Instead it is a manifestation of anxiety with rapid change and resulting frustration with and suspicion of the authorities.
Reactive nationalism carries bits and pieces of ideologies and policies propelled by emotion. Common denominators of national identity remain largely implicit and unanalyzed.
These are negative features because emotionally-driven politics tends to be inchoate, leaderless, episodic as it reacts to overreach by elites, including oppressive social controls.
In other words, Bunkerism and to a large extent some of the more lowbrow Type I "activists” one finds on ‘movement” comments threads in online forums.
The Trump and Brexit revolts were based on passionate rejection of globalist social transformation and stifling social controls. The same reactions have propelled Pauline Hanson’s electoral success.
And without analysis, without Type II activists preaching reason and rational strategizing, all of that has come to naught.
Comparing Types of Nationalism
The six types of Australian nationalism have been combined in various ways over two centuries, concluding in the 1970s with a relatively disjunctive break with the ethnic-liberal combination that had shaped the nation from the First Fleet.
All types of nationalism have encompassed bad decisions and unrealistic assumptions. But overall, ethnic and liberal nationalisms have proven less susceptible to elite free riding. The liberal type has the added advantage of retaining political forms developed over centuries that help the formation of public goods.
There is no reason why a regulated and rational ethnic nationalism cannot utilize the political and social technologies of liberal nationalism without going “full liberal” and making ethnic preservation merely proximate means rather than ultimate ends.
Australia’s current mix of civic nationalism and multiculturalism constitutes a top-down elite agenda. It co-exists in antagonistic tension with latent ethnic nationalism, as demonstrated by the recent success of minor parties. The antagonism is caused by the multicultural establishment seeking to transform the original nation. Their dominance of the culture industries has not eliminated popular nationalism, which remains a sleeping giant.
Elites are traitors who will one day need to be held accountable.
Liberal nationalism has the advantage of self-criticism. We all operate with imperfect knowledge. By opening our beliefs to rational inspection we increase the chance of avoiding ill-informed ingrained assumptions, including those concerning goals and methods. A moderate culture of self-criticism allows a movement to adapt to changing conditions, including new tactics and strategy by opponents and potential allies. This nimbleness will be indispensible in defeating more powerful opponents.
I fail to see why a sane and reasonable ethnic nationalism cannot have self-criticism. I realize that Der Movement is congenitally resistant to self-criticism and accountability; however, liberal nationalism has been equally so, which is why it has collapsed into globalist multiculturalism.
Liberal nationalism’s main weakness compared to ethnic nationalism is its tendency to collapse into the civic kind. The weakness lies in its reliance on ideas transmitted by higher education, at a time when universities have been captured by the West-hating left. Ethnic nationalism is less vulnerable in this respect because it has a stronger emotional basis in ethnic nepotism. It would remain loyal to the nation even if diversity were found not to have multiple negative impacts, because ethnic nationalists are willing to pay a price to live among their people in a relatively homogeneous self-governing society. The weakness of this doctrine is cultural, leading to rigidity of policy and ideas. The end result is compromise of the representative democratic system.
That system SHOULD be compromised. Bring it on!
Ethnic nationalism, and certainly the reactive type, are insufficient credentials for an individual or party to assume government, unless ethnic identity is taken to include the political traditions inherited from England. One way or another, nationalist voters are advised to elect only those politicians who have demonstrated competence, character and tradition in the broad sweep of government duties in the tradition of representative democracy.
Err…these latter things we need to get rid of.
One marked weakness of unqualified ethnic politics is that it risks emulating multiculturalism’s effect of fragmenting society along ethnic and religious lines.
But this is precisely what we need! The road to freedom passes through racial balkanization and chaos, there is likely no other way. We NEED to be fragmented.
This has a direct human cost in social conflict and an indirect economic cost due to policy being diverted from serving public goods to serving particular group interests.
We have sacrificed ethnic interests for “the economy” long enough. That smacks of economic nationalism. And public goods SHOULD serve majority interests.
Given its mixed history, liberal nationalism might appear to be unreliable. One sign that it could be reclaimed is that every instance of it serving hostile goals has entailed fraud, the compromise of Enlightenment values of rationality and liberty.
I would say its inability to recognize and combat such fraud indicates a fatal weakness of liberal nationalism.
Australia’s historical experience – of liberal nationalism giving way to globalism – indicates that liberal nationalism is sustainable only when it respects majority ethnic and religious identity as legitimate values. Liberal nationalism’s divorce from ethnic identity in the decades before 1970 opened it to intellectual corruption and left-authoritarianism.
I suggest that liberal nationalism always has within it this inherent trend toward anti-majoritarian multiculturalism. Therefore it cannot be trusted and should be replaced by a sane and balanced ethnic nationalism (which includes racial nationalism).
Ethnic and liberal nationalism have different strengths in relation to multiculturalism. The growth of an ethnic nationalist movement would be accelerated by the strategy of democratic multiculturalism described earlier, due to rising Anglo consciousness. However, the doctrine does not provide a political framework for accommodating other identities when the state is retaken. At that point a liberal frame would make an emerging ethnic state more governable, more stable, by providing political processes for managing diversity.
Err…we should not have to “manage diversity” – we need to end it. I suppose there can be an intermediate period as the ethnic state is “emerging” in which the remnants of diversity would need to be managed, but a regulated and sane ethnic nationalism can handle that, and “keep the eyes on the prize.” I simply do not trust liberal nationalism or any other approach that dose not have ethnic interests and the endpoint of analysis.
Informed liberal nationalism can be an effective, though partial, defence of majority ethnicity against globalists and multiculturalists. That is because it converges on ethnic nationalism at the policy level. Historically, liberal nationalism respected ethnic sentiment. Together the liberal and ethnic types encompassed motives rational and civic on the one hand, and nepotistic on the other. Together they promoted the national bio-culture.
The fusion of liberal and ethnic nationalism that shaped Australia for two centuries is better equipped with releaser memes than competing doctrines. On the liberal side, that is because institutions such as representative democracy and rule of law are part of Anglo identity, and therefore add another cultural layer to markers of descent.
This fusion is akin to the “mixed ethic” that Salter promotes in On Genetic Interests. The pure ethic would be analogous to unregulated ethnic nationalism and then we have all the ethics that treat ethnic interests as secondary or irrelevant. The mixed ethic fuses primacy of ethnic interests with a doctrine of rights, similar to what is suggested here.
The main disadvantage of this approach is when its identitarianism is implicit. Only an explicit appeal to the historic nation can establish a nationalist rhetoric able to fully mobilise Anglo Australians.
Yes, this is the case. Unfortunately, the next paragraph promotes the alleged positives of the failed implicit approach.
Implicit ethnicity also has advantages. Decades of indoctrination by media and education bureaucracies have made Anglo ethnic nepotism taboo. Liberal nationalism advances ethnic interests indirectly. Indirect ethnic preservation has the additional attraction of conforming more with the non-ideological tradition of Anglophone cultures. English-derived politics is famously divorced from theory compared to the Continental tradition. People distrust theory in politics, as much as they do theory in art. They perceive both as pretentious. Like conceptual art, a political position won’t appeal to the common-sense public if it relies on abstruse theory. But everyone understands and desires social peace, stability and prosperity, which true liberal nationalism would protect better than bogus civic nationalism.
Implicit politics have ALWAYS failed. Mainstreaming has failed in Europe again and again. Even Orban, under EU constraints to modify his language, sometimes drifts from more implicit culturalist talk to that of ethny. Now, Salter here talks about Australia, and contrasts “English-derived politics” from that of “the Continental tradition.” But even in “English-derived” traditions, implicit politics and mainstreaming has failed. Has One Nation succeeded? No. Brexit has led to a current UK where Polish immigrants are driven out by racist anti-White Negroes and South Asians; native Britons are a non-factor in their own nation. Thatcher co-opted anti-immigration angst to end up being a fraud. Then in America there is a long tradition of Republican dog whistling on race that leads nowhere: Nixon-Reagan-Trump. I most strongly disagree with Salter here. “But everyone understands and desires social peace, stability and prosperity, which true liberal nationalism would protect better than bogus civic nationalism.” The other side will construe “true liberal nationalism” as akin to fascism and social strife.
To put this another way, the choice of types of nationalism is not only an intellectual exercise. It is also one of self-examination. The choice must feel right to the majority now or in the foreseeable future. And that depends on who we are psychologically, who we are in terms of shared memories, and who we could feasibly become as new memories slowly accumulate and the culture changes. Multicultural critics portray Anglo-Australians as uniquely driven by racial identity. In fact Anglo Australians are among the least collectivist of peoples, much less so than multicultural activists. They are so tolerant of foreigners to have retained their composure while being inundated by immigrants.
I do not fully agree here. We should not let the herd, with their psychological comfort level, define for us the limits of our choice of nationalism. They need to be led by the nose, ultimately. The sheeple are a herd of lemmings (if I may mix metaphors and analogies) and the vanguard need to set the tone.
In reality ethnic activism by and for the majority is awkward in the present political climate. That does not make it inappropriate. In a healthy political culture, one not distorted by a hostile culture industry, positive majority ethnocentrism would seem natural. And it is important that it be so again, because individuals with heightened ethnocentrism are their peoples’ natural guardians, the passionate counterpoint to cold utilitarianism. Like a mother alert to her baby’s cry, ethnocentric individuals of all backgrounds are the first to feel estranged and besieged by social trends that are adverse for their people.
But how do we protect these protectors? How do we defeat social pricing? There is a number of references and implications in these two essays to feed forward positive feedback loops favoring activism on behalf of the ethny. I agree, but with one caveat – how to get it started? We are at a sticking point. It is like a biochemical reaction with an enormous energy of activation to overcome to get it started. We need an enzymatic catalyst. From where? What will it be?
Majority ethnocentrists’ expression of concern for their people makes them prime targets of the “human rights” apparatus, part-and-parcel of big-state globalism. Those who chant “all love is equal” excoriate anyone who loves the wrong race. Beginning with the Bolshevik coup in Russia in 1917, a powerful strand of left ideology has sought to suppress human nature to create a communist utopia. The civilised response is the liberal one: society should respect ethnic activists of all stripes, including the red white and blue of the founding people. Attacks on ethnic nepotism are unacceptable in a liberal society.
Ethnic nepotism is also strongly attacked by the Alt Wrong/HBD/race realists. Actually, it is only White ethnic nepotism that is, in practice, attacked. Always remember that the Alt Wrong is a vehicle to promote Jewish-Asian ethnic interests.
In particular liberal nationalists worthy of the name should accept individuals who profess the interests of the nation. They should accept as comrades those who do so in liberal terms, something civic nationalists and minority chauvinists can never allow. In practical terms that does not mean allowing national activists to make policy in general, because they represent one interest among many. But it does mean protecting the right to free speech and party membership of those who stand up for the historic nation. Liberal nationalists should do that not only as an expression of civil liberties but as a means of ensuring the multiple public goods that flow from a secure national identity and sovereignty.
OK, but as a racial nationalist I don’t view my position as “one interest among many” – maybe liberal nationalism itself should be so viewed.
This paper has argued that Anglo patriots should use a dual political-cultural strategy to defend the historic Australian nation and reestablish the liberal nationalist state built by the founders. The recent success of nationalist protest parties in many Western societies, including Australia, indicates that voters are ready to confer significant political and cultural niches on leaders who are willing to challenge the dominant culture. There are ways forward.
There are ways forward but apparently no one available (and ethnically acceptable to the “movement” rank-and-file) to step and perform those steps.
In summary, Salter's two-part essay is interesting and useful, but readers can observe key differences between his positions and mine. We agree on the fundamentals, and on the weaknesses of reactive nationalism and of nationalism lacking in proper analysis. I understand why he in his position advocates more moderate positions. But I will continue to assert the primacy of explicit racial nationalism and the irrefutable fact that mainstreaming has failed.
Labels: Australia, civic nationalism, cultural nationalism, EGI, ethnonationalism, mainstreaming, racial nationalism, Salter, strategy and tactics
