I was reading the Z Man’s Monday morning posts and it was about how conservatism went wrong. And as usual it was very informative and thought provoking. One of the points had to do with Harry Jaffa and that ended up with a discussion of Jaffa’s current descendants at the Claremont Institute. Z Man pointed to two posts on Claremont’s American Mind website (1, 2).
In the first post called “No New Normal” Z Man is satisfied with the argument until it involves race.
“Here is a post on the same site as the Gottfried post, in which the editors reject the new normal of American politics. Everything is good until this. “In reality, race is not the ultimate fact of human identity or the central problem of American life. Different ethnic populations have different general tendencies, but not different natural rights. Everyone is capable of learning to live well in this country, but only if we confidently endorse both our geographical and cultural boundaries.””
Z Man continues on about the second post, “Demographics are Not Destiny”
“The linked post in that quote is worth reading, as it rips the mask from the “new conservatism” and exposes it as the old conservatism. The great fork in the road, the shadow that hangs over human history, is biology. The story of man is not one tale with many chapters, but many stories of many people, all of whom have their own unique understanding of themselves and how they should live. The genuine man of the Right understands this and accepts it. Equality, in short, is inhuman.”
These thoughts encapsulate the difference between the Dissident Right and the Civic Nationalists. The dissidents dogmatically stress that the differences between people, make living together under the American Constitution impossible. This seems to me to be a horribly pessimistic assertion. And since the Z Man states often that he doesn’t believe that there will be any partition of the United States along racial lines this pessimism about the various human races and ethnicities living together seems like a hopeless situation for his side.
By the way I am aware of why it would seem that race relations in the United States are so abysmal. The Democrats have spent the last sixty years, more or less, weaponizing the African American population as a club to defeat their political opponents and almost as much time doing the same thing with Hispanics and Asians. It really is no wonder that all of American society seems poised to melt down into a cauldron of race hatred at any time.
But I think there is a path out of this rat trap. The Democrats were never satisfied with dividing the country into white and non-white. They exploited male versus female antagonism and then they really went crazy with all of the various sexual deviancy populations. The LGBT thing was their greatest extravaganza.
But all of this follow-on intersectional advocacy doesn’t sit very well with the people that they think they’ve captured during their race dividing stage. Most Hispanics don’t want to be called Latinx. And most of them don’t much want their kids groomed for inclusion in the trans-gender club at school. Likewise, Asian parents don’t want their kids denied academic advancement because they don’t rank high enough in the intersectional bingo game.
And these ethnic groups are starting to realize that giving their votes to the Democrats doesn’t create a better country for their kids to live in. Recent polls show that this is already happening. Less than 30% of Hispanics think Biden is doing a good job. That is lower than his number among white voters. So, it shows that forming a coalition on the Right with non-white Americans is possible. What seems to be the stumbling block to accomplishing this is the abysmal ineptitude of the Republican Party.
Think about it. Donald Trump was branded as a racist in 2016 when he was running for president on the platform of building a wall on the Mexican border. And yet he had a higher percentage of Hispanic voters in 2020. That seems to tell me that it’s more the messenger than the message. Trump spoke crudely but honestly about what he believed and people respected him for it. All of this leads me to believe that leaders who aren’t afraid to speak to people of different races and who can convince them that their lives would be better under “equality” rather than under “equity” could forge a coalition based on mutual benefit.
Someone like Ron DeSantis is doing that in Florida which has a huge Hispanic population. Trump could do it again if he can just get an unrigged election in 2024. So, I throw my hat in with the civic nationalists. But I think the dissidents should be willing to talk with us. They have lots of important insights into the failures that the Republicans have been guilty of over the years. They could point out the mistakes we must not make again. And they represent a sizable chunk of the population. They need to be part of the dialog.
As I’ve said before, the Right needs to expand the conversation. When the neocons were the gate keepers, they got to dictate what was the window of acceptable opinion and that got us to the point where objecting to illegal immigration was an unacceptable position. It’s important that a robust debate goes on and some of the people on the outskirts of the party are right about things that the establishment has been dead wrong about. The people on the fringes aren’t right about everything but a dialog with them would be good for both sides.
UPDATE 24MAY2022
A commenter named Tucker had this to say:
“I would strongly recommend that the author of this article visit this link and absorb the rock solid analysis that “Civic Nationalism” is a gigantic fraud.
https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2020/08/civic-nationalism-is-fraud.html
I also encourage any readers of this author’s article to read the analysis cited above.”
So I went to the link and read the 5,500 word post that listed five reasons why civic nationalism is a fraud:
I. This brings us to the first and most obvious fraud of civic nationalism. Being that, by its very definition, civic nationalism isn’t even nationalism.
II. The second fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s just globalism by another name.
III. The third fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s extremely vague and practically impossible to enforce.
IV. The fourth fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s born from cowardice and cannot save whites from replacement and extinction.
V. The final fraud of civic nationalism is that it’s never worked and it never will work.
Looking through these various charges of fraud I see a list of the grievances of white citizens of the Anglosphere against their governments for allowing large scale immigration from the third world. And I am fully sympathetic with these issues. I am also aware of the reverse discrimination that these governments have been guilty of over the last decades in a wrong headed attempt to undermine the dominant culture in these places. But in my mind none of those problems are tied to civic nationalism. They are tied to some sort of white guilt that the elite class feels. Donald Trump had no problem pointing to illegal immigration as a danger to our country. And he was clear that reverse discrimination was going on in our government. It seems to me that what is needed to eliminate these problems are leaders who are not ashamed of the history of the people who built the country.
As far as the demographic situation, stopping uncontrolled immigration will lessen the impact of demographic change but even if every “illegal immigrant” was sent home the non-white component of the population would still be a very significant part of the United States. But I am more interested in making sure that the country maintains the culture that made America a special place.
The European heritage that the English and the other European settlers brought has a distinctive style. It fostered thrift, hard work and family life. That is what needs to be maintained. Celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July are an important part of the civic life of our country. The Christian heritage is an important part. These things have resonance with many of the immigrants who came here in the last fifty years. Latin Americans are Catholics. They enjoy Christmas the same as Europeans. Many of the Asians who live here are Christians too. Certainly there are differences in these peoples’ lives but they can be good Americans.
I think the more important problem is finding leaders who aren’t afraid to call out anti-white discrimination. We need politicians and judges who will strike down things like affirmative action and restore our rights to freedom of free association. The endless attempts to enforce equality of outcome in the face of the reality of human differences must end. Seeing racism in every disparate outcome is nonsense. Some people are smarter. Some people are harder working. Punishing those people to make less intelligent or lazier people feel good is unjust. What must be maintained is equality under the law. Equal opportunity is sufficient to allow just outcomes.
And private association also needs to be unrestrained by government oversight. People need free association to flourish culturally. Men’s clubs have the right to exist. So do ethnic societies. So do people who like baseball. You wouldn’t force a baseball club to give equal time to a member who wanted the yearly outing to be basketball game. If the Daughters of the American Revolution are forced to accept members from Papua-New Guinea because otherwise feeling might be hurt that negates the very meaning of the organization.
I don’t see a civic nationalist point of view preventing anyone from eliminating a lot of the problems that have made life in the United States unfair to white people. What it takes is being unafraid to call out unconstitutional laws and also putting a brake on immigration to prevent destroying the original culture and way of life.