For Others & Their Prosperity

4,280 words

constitutional-convention [1]

There exists no simpler, shorter, or more poetic expression of nationalism than five words from the Constitution of the United States—“For Ourselves and Our Posterity.” For all the flaws of the Founding, no White Nationalist can dispute the beauty of that phrase, nor its relevance to our cause.

Yet as the American Experiment rolls on, even the Constitution is destined to be trampled, as the United States may be the only nation in history where patriotism is defined as the willingness to replace your own citizens.

The Nature of the American Polity

Any nation, by definition, excludes. Some people belong to the political community, and some do not. All nations are reliant to some extent on ethnic kinship. Some admit it, some deny it, but all need it, as the first political communities relied upon blood ties, with extended families developing into tribes. Whether it be an empire or a city-state, any polity needs an ethnic core that can be built upon. A pure “proposition nation” doesn’t exist any more than do unicorns—and the fact that some people claim to have seen one or the other makes no difference.

Northern Europeans, for evolutionary, historical, and eventually ideological reasons, are perhaps unique in creating political units ostensibly free of tribalism or ethnic ties. The most popular variant of this is the “social contract” concept that underlies the United States—the government exists solely to protect the “life, liberty, and property” of its citizens, and when it fails to do so, it can be replaced.

The problem with this concept of the state is it ignores the deeper sources of a state’s authority. Most states throughout history have claimed legitimacy from the gods, be it through the Mandate of Heaven, divine right, or sacred blood. But religion itself, of course, partially rests upon a racial or ethnic basis for acceptance [2].

The nation-state, the most stable political system since the fall of the reactionary and multinational monarchies, derives its authority from its purpose as the political expression of a particular people. Even revolutionary France owed its legitimacy to the idea of the Patrie in arms [3] against foreign kings more than some declaration of rights.

Whatever the case, the state becomes worthy of allegiance because it represents something greater than any one person. It is something beyond the people who compromise it, whether it owes its origins to the heavens or to the Volk. As Hegel put it, “The march of God in the world, that is what the state is. The basis of the state is the power of reason actualizing itself as will.”[1]

Though the Founding Fathers defined their state in classical liberal terms as a necessary institution designed to protect “rights,” they still relied upon non-liberal sources of primordial authority. As Jared Taylor outlines in “What the Founders Thought About Race [4]” and other writings, the Founding Fathers took for granted that “only people of European stock could maintain a society in which they would wish to live.” Even Thomas Jefferson’s egalitarian ideals were grounded in Germanic and Anglo-Saxon conceptions of liberty and active citizenship. His America was a kind of agrarian Herrenvolk republicanism rather than a multicultural democracy.

The Founding Fathers may have talked a lot about equality—but they assumed that America would be a white country of primarily Northern European stock. The purpose of the government was to protect the rights of the people—but it was presupposed that a people actually existed to be protected. As John Jay put it in Federalist Number Two:

I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Unfortunately, the ramifications of this were never really spelled out in the foundation of the state. The existence of the white American people and culture was simply taken for granted. Whatever certain racial laws existed within the country, it was never explicitly stated that the United States was to be a country for a particular people. Moreover, economic considerations and the “right” to do whatever one wants with one’s own property were held as the highest law even from the beginning. As George Washington put it [5] in a letter looking for workers, “If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, Jews or Christian of an Sect, or they may be Atheists.”

Easy to say when you will only have to command them from your plantation. But what about when they get to vote and become “fellow citizens”? This seems not to have been anticipated.

There were deeper flaws that went beyond race. The Founding Fathers were building on a robust British culture and Western ideas about patriotism, civitas, and the state, with a particular focus on the Greek and Roman examples. Unfortunately, they assumed that people would always feel some sense of duty towards the polity. The Founding Fathers seem to believe that because citizens enjoyed “liberty,” they would be especially active in defending the state. As Thomas Jefferson said [6] in his first inaugural address, “I believe this . . . the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.”

This is precisely the opposite of what has occurred. As a character says [7] in Harold Covington’s A Mighty Fortress, “With liberal democracy, you start at a certain level of moral and decent existence and then everything decays from there, kind of like radioactive half-life. The United States started at an exalted level in 1783 and it decayed from that point on.” If the premise of the state is to defend “rights,” the state merely becomes a utilitarian instrument rather than the source of a sacred authority. Why sacrifice or even care for something that only exists to make sure you can keep your wealth?

Instead of guaranteeing the citizen’s devotion to the state, in the long run, the classical liberal state renders citizenship meaningless. If it is not based on sacred duty, ethnicity, or shared culture, it is simply a legal and (more importantly) economic instrument. As such, “loyalty” is moot—the country you want to “belong” to is the country that offers you the best deal. And as the franchise inevitably expands, the services and programs offered by the state do as well. Politicians bribe the voters with their own money—except for those who can also donate to their re-election coffers, who receive special bribes of their own.

The result is that the state is most responsive to those constituencies that offer the least to the national community. Slowly democracy transforms into kakistocracy—rule by the worst. A welfare-dependent minority that votes as part of a bloc is an important part of a politician’s winning coalition. A white suburban office drone with a mortgage is just a kulak to be drained for resources. More than that, those who receive the most from the state seem to be those who contribute the least to the common good.

The country can trade off its accumulated cultural strengths for a long time, but not forever. Eventually, civic virtue collapses. Mark Steyn in After America quotes Tom Wolfe, who notes that historically most people don’t live for themselves, but see themselves (even if unconsciously) as “part of a great biological stream” binding the lives of their ancestors, children, and even their neighbors. But in a modern democracy, Steyn writes, “You don’t need to make material sacrifices: the state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country.” As he put [8] it elsewhere, “An army has to wage war on behalf of something real. For better or worse, ‘king and country’ is real, and so, mostly for worse, are the tribal loyalties of Africa’s blood-drenched civil wars.”

If there is “nothing to kill or die for,” there is nothing to live for either. The result is that just like religion in the modern world, patriotism is a lifestyle choice—what country’s passport you hold is only slightly more important than what soft drink you prefer or whether you support Xbox or PlayStation [9]. Indeed, a person’s preferred gaming system may be a greater subject of emotional attachment than their supposed country.

When you are a deracinated individual living in a society that upholds deracinated individualism as its highest virtue, you have no stake in the survival of that society. And on the rare occasions the society tries to harness its people to a collective purpose, the “citizens” look around and realize they have nothing in common with one another, not even interests. Why should they care?

An Empty America for Both Left & Right

In the Age of Obama, progressives have grown increasingly comfortable openly defending government as the “only we thing all belong to,” in the Democratic National Committee’s phrase. This idea is infuriating to the Beltway Right. But conservatives themselves are slowly reaching their final form [10] as economists who make their free market fundamentalism palatable with a belief in “American Exceptionalism.”

What is American Exceptionalism? Even its leading proponents find it hard to define. Addressing the concept, James Kirkpatrick writes [11]:

American Exceptionalism can variously mean that America is immune to the laws of history, or more virtuous, or more capitalist, or more powerful than everyone else. Sometimes it is supposed to mean all of these things at once.

Occasionally, Republican politicians seem to believe that American Exceptionalism means that America must always act independently and be at the forefront of any global situation, simply for its own sake. Having abandoned racial, religious, and cultural forms of identity, and with the Constitution “no serious threat to our system of government” (in Joe Sobran’s phrase [12]), a nonsensical tautology is all the true believers in America have left. America is different, they say, because it is America.

In policy terms, it doesn’t say what America actually is—what policies it pursues, what the structure of government is, or even what people make it up. What matters is that it still calls itself the United States and is therefore worthy of the same attachment and sacrifice as the Anglo-Saxon America of 1783. American conservatism is a cargo cult masquerading as a political philosophy.

Ultimately, both sides in mainstream American politics are united in defining the country as a cultureless and raceless entity. To the Left, being a consumer of government services makes you an American—indeed, it’s the only thing that makes you an American. A client of the welfare state is far more patriotic than some sad old rube like Cliven Bundy [13]—who is a “traitor,” to use Harry Reid’s phrase. Thus, Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats’ go-to white male token [14] for the rubes, says [15] of illegal immigrants occupying the nation’s territory that “I believe they’re already American citizens.” Notably, the white working man’s champion made these remarks to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

As for the Republicans, they define Americanism as contributing to the economy—preferably in the form of cheap labor, so as to increase the profits of donors. Thus, the flagship magazine of American conservatism, National Review, graces us with an article entitled “Immigration, America’s Advantage [16].” One author is Lee Habeeb [17], a talk radio executive who makes his living telling your typical Lumpenkonservative what he wants to hear [18] and finding others to do the same.

The other is Mike Leven, who is apparently a noted conservative scholar even though his day job is serving as an executive for Las Vegas Sands. His boss is Sheldon Adelson, a wealthy Jewish donor who has more influence on American conservatives than you ever will. Adelson, you will be happy to know, funds [19] and supports the “Birthright” program designed to cultivate loyalty to his ethnostate and wants a fence around “our country [20]” (by which he means Israel). In America, like his underling Leven, he is one of the leading voices for amnesty [21]. The charge of dual loyalty would be unfair—because dual loyalty would be a dramatic improvement.

The article itself is interesting because it directly addresses population decline and even ethnic demographics. For example:

Take Russia. According to the United Nations, its adult population will fall from 90 million today to 20 million by the end of the century. Eighty percent of the population of the Russian Federation are ethnic Russians, but fertility is higher among Central Asian Muslim minorities. Some experts predict a Muslim majority in Russia by 2040. This past year, more babies were aborted in Russia than were born.

While not directly stated, it is obviously implied that a majority-Muslim Russia isn’t really Russia and that to survive, the country has to not just increase its population, but increase its ethnic Russian population. The reference to abortion following the prediction of the Muslim majority implies that the country would not be facing this threat if the practice wasn’t so prevalent.

Japan and Europe are also said to share the fate of demographic decline, through Muslim immigration is curiously not mentioned as something worth considering in Western Europe.

In contrast:

America’s secret weapon on the all-important population front is our immigrant advantage. It’s our immigrant population that has kept America from falling over the demographic cliff of late. Today, there are roughly 38 million people in the U.S. who were born somewhere else; two-thirds of them are here legally.

“Consider that just four million babies are born annually in the U.S.,” Jonathan Last wrote in The Weekly Standard last year. “If you strip these immigrants—and their relatively high fertility rates—from our population profile, America suddenly looks an awful lot like continental Europe.”

Not asked is who these “Americans” are. As the above states, most of the groups with a higher fertility rate come from the immigrant population. What difference does it make if “American” population growth is coming from people who have nothing in common with the rest of the country except standing on the same piece of dirt? And why does it matter when we are talking about Russia, but it suddenly doesn’t when we are talking about America?

The answer is that there is no America. There’s just an economy. The remainder of the article simply outlines the ways that immigrants allegedly help the economy. Laughing is the only way to keep from crying when reading the arguments and normative claims that follow.

To take just one example, America is “Scrooge-like” because the government doesn’t distribute enough H-1B visas for skilled workers. The spectacle of gambling executives lecturing Americans for being “Scrooge-like” for opposing lower wages speaks for itself.

Eventually, we are told, “America should do more than simply cherry-pick from the world’s ‘best and brightest’ workers. We should increase our numbers of ‘unskilled’ immigrants, too.”

Ignoring the disastrous economic consequences of mass immigration and instead praising it as a blessing is bad enough. But what we have here is a case of almost religious fundamentalism—as if anyone can seriously believe America’s greatest weakness is a lack of unskilled peasants from the Third World.

But they aren’t just cheap labor. In fact, they’re better than you. Habeeb and Leven write:

No one takes a berth in steerage because he heard that in America the government gives you stuff. It takes courage to leave your country and cross an ocean. Most immigrants do it not for themselves but for their families. That kind of selflessness and risk-taking is a perfect American skill set, perfectly reflecting our national character.

Some minor points. First, notice the reference to the “berth in steerage,” meant to call up hallowed memories of Ellis Island [22] and plucky, hard-working immigrants coming from Europe. Apparently we are expected to believe that after thorough processing, contemporary immigrants will set up fruit stands while their children play stickball.

Of course, what we have today are overwhelmingly non-white immigrants who cross the Southern border illegally with the benign indifference of those who rule us and are supposed to protect us. Once they arrive in their new country, illegal immigrants from Mexico regard the United States with contempt and loathing, unable to keep from shouting anti-American slogans even while marching for amnesty. The majority of the immigrants in this country never “crossed an ocean,” just the Rio Grande. But Leven’s ancestors did, and we have to pay for it for all eternity.

Secondly, the vast majority of immigrants to any country throughout history “did it for their families.” Why this fact is supposed to have an impact on public policy is unknown. However, this current group of immigrants is probably less likely to “do it for their families” than any other group in history. A not insignificant percentage of Hispanic illegals are sneaking across the border by themselves and then either entrusting their children to a coyote or simply expecting them to get to America alone. Another common occurrence is children being dumped in the US by parents who don’t want them—another triumph of Hispanic family values.

The results are predictable as “the children” and future “DREAMers” so beloved by the media are raped, abused, or even killed [23]. The media is largely silent about these crimes, or finds a way to blame it on whites. After all, it’s not as if something really bad happened to them—like a white guy calling them a racial slur. What’s being murdered compared to the “microaggression” of a Southern accent?

But the point here is to appeal to American conservatives. American conservatives like “families,” immigrants (mostly) like their “families,” therefore, conservatives should like immigrants. Hey, they are just like us!

Third, it’s simply not true that immigrants don’t know that the government “gives you stuff.” In fact, you can track migration patterns of non-whites in the United States based on the generosity of the welfare available, as the residents of Maine [24] and Minnesota [25] suddenly swamped by Somalis are finding out. Immigrants are far more likely [26] to use means-tested welfare programs than non-immigrants. And the American government actually is partnering [27] with Mexican consulates to make sure Mexican immigrants in the United States receive EBT payments—paid for, of course, by American taxpayers. If an immigrant hasn’t heard that the American government doesn’t just “give you stuff,” it’s not for the Obama regime’s lack of trying.

But there’s a bigger issue to all this. Implicit in everything the authors are saying is the idea that Americans exist to serve an abstraction called the economy. Indeed, the greater the “skill set” of each American, the more American they are. We will exceed Russia, Japan, and “Old Europe” precisely because we are willing to replace ourselves in order to keep our welfare state functioning and our GDP growing.

It’s not entirely true that American conservatives are without a sense of race. After all, John McCain channeled a kind of Bizarro Miguel Serrano when he said [28], “Anyone who is afraid that somehow our culture will be anything but enriched by fresh blood and culture, in my view, has a distorted view of history and has a pessimistic view of our future.” Jeb Bush brags about the “fertility” of the new Hispanic America he is trying to create, and cuckold conservatives like Matt Lewis actually gloat about whites “not having babies.” However, in any of these cases, if whites actually were to start having babies or the American polity implemented pro-natal policies, can anyone doubt these same people would call it “un-American”?

Perhaps the authors are right when they say “selflessness” is key to the American national character, but not in the way they meant. Presumably if every single American were replaced by a more productive worker tomorrow, “we” still would have triumphed somehow, as Americans.

Team America

In the eyes of its fiercest conservative defenders, America is a team. Anyone can buy the jersey—even if it is made overseas by coolie labor. The country provides people with an opportunity to make money with fewer restraints than anywhere else, and that’s it. But what else do you need? As the satirical program South Park’s Stan Marsh said in the first episode after 9/11, “America’s our home . . . it’s our team.” To which Kyle replies, “Go America. And go Broncos [29].”

At the risk of overanalyzing a cartoon, this is basically how most people think of the country. It’s all they have left. The problem of course is that a real nation or tribe isn’t a team—it’s part of your very identity, something as deep and important as your family or sex. Of course, since both of those are “social constructs” now, it’s probably not surprising that a nation is too.

Unfortunately for the country, no one else has this abstract idea of patriotism except white Americans, especially conservatives. To take the metaphor a bit further, while white Americans fantasize about the global standing of some abstraction based on “ideals” and “values,” their non-white fellow citizens can’t support [30] “Team USA” even when it comes to sports, as the US Soccer team playing in Los Angeles found out. Non-whites have their ethnostates and their real homelands. Only white conservatives are left with their proposition nation.

The Left is more honest. It at least admits that there is a historic American nation of European Americans. The Left just hates it. The new America is an egalitarian empire where membership is defined as fealty to the government. Indeed, in the Age of Obama it is the Left that is adopting the “love it or leave it” rhetoric of the Vietnam-era American Right. Criticizing the President’s new health care law is “unpatriotic,” after all.

In both cases, your loyalty to the country is defined as your loyalty to an abstraction—either in propping up a government or an economy that we somehow belong to. Neither Left nor Right thinks the country should be connected to any particular group of people. It is simply there, and we happen to be on it.

The racial ramifications are easy to spell out. American Indians become “Native Americans” who are more authentically American than the British settlers of Jamestown or Plymouth. A slave “built” the country in a more substantial way than a Washington, Jefferson, or Madison. And Mexicans in the American Southwest have a greater claim to the American story than white settlers moving west—after all, Mexicans can say “the border crossed us, we didn’t cross the border.”

How often in the immigration debate does a Leftist make what he thinks is the knockout argument that America “belongs” to the Indians—forgetting of course, that, in George Lincoln Rockwell’s [31] phrase, “America did not exist until the coming of the white man.” But you can’t say that if your country is just a geographic expression.

The result is a polity indifferent to its ethnic core and founding stock. It can replace and dispossess the people who created it and somehow operate on the assumption that it is the same place. More importantly, even the people who are being replaced and dispossessed will think it is the same place. Instead of the country that the Framers created “for Ourselves and Our Posterity,” what we have is a country that belongs to everyone except the people who founded it. We don’t have a Fatherland or a Motherland—just a “homeland.”

Ironically, to flip around what Edward Wilson said in The Good Shepherd, it’s everyone else who has the United States of America. Whites are just visiting.

What is most frustrating about this is whatever high idealism is used to justify the universalistic vision of Left or Right, in the end what drives policy is the basest materialism of the worst members of society. The classical liberal vision has ultimately triumphed because the American state is a resource to be exploited by the individual—either through government benefits or the subsidization of corporations and cheap labor. A classical liberal’s protest that his vision was of “limited government” changes nothing about the inevitability of the sprawling EBT democracy his vision has spawned.

The American system is an engine of degradation for everyone involved—and the fuel it relies upon is the misguided idealism of those white Americans who keep feeding into the system. Absent radical change, it will continue running—until it has fully replaced the very people it relies upon.

Ultimately, we must return to first principles. What is the nation? And who compromises it? White Nationalists have an answer. The triumphs of the historic American nation are the product of the European-Americans who built it. That population must awaken to itself and become a people. And once it is aware of itself as a people, it must seize a state for itself, rooted in Primordial Tradition and racial reality rather than phony Enlightenment slogans ignored by the same people who put them to paper.

The legacy of achievement of the United States of America will belong to the rising state. But the failed classical liberal ideology must be rejected at every level. Our nation and our people are one and the same—and it belongs to Ourselves and Our Posterity, alone.

Note

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 258.