Do We Need Enemies?
Introducing the Amoeba Model of Political Change

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pollice Verso (detail), 1872

2,019 words

Early on in Samuel Huntington’s classic political analysis, The Clash of Civilizations, he makes the following point: “For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations.”

Well, that’s us, of course. If anything, the Alt Right is “seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity” for white people wherever they are. This is our driving force, and I don’t need to explain it further here. But is it true that we need enemies to do this? 

That’s a tough one, actually. Depending on how you frame your answer, either yes or no could be correct. I don’t want yes to be the answer. I would like to think that much of what white ethno-nationalists do is point to all the great things we have accomplished and still accomplish in the world. Whites have built the greatest civilizations in history and have encyclopedias full of achievements. This should be a source of racial pride. There is something positive and life-affirming when you see yourself as a vessel connecting your ancestors with your descendants. Your priorities broaden and sharpen at the same time once you realize that you are part of something much bigger than yourself. It may be taboo these days for people of European descent to think this way, but it is still perfectly natural. All other peoples do it. And they should. It feels good.

I think one of the reasons why whites have lost their racial identities and are on the brink of losing their homelands is because they have severed ties with both their past and the future. They apply modern ethical standards to historic practices such as slavery and imperialism and become appalled. “No past for us,” they say, even though all races have atrocities buried in their histories. Furthermore, many whites would rather follow their chosen lifestyles than bother to have children. So in their best Johnny Rotten vociferations they can claim they have “no future” as well. For them, life just morphs into a dreary, expanding middle of a present. Not much to live for if you look at it like that.

Only a positive racial identity can rescue whites from such deathly doldrums. In America, at least, the Alt Right is one of the few movements that offers to do this. Notice how I did not once use the word “enemy” in the above paragraph. That’s because one needs an enemy to have a racial identity as much as one needs an enemy to put pants on one leg at a time. Like I said, it’s natural.

So then why does world-renowned political scientist Samuel P. Huntington say that “peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity” need enemies to do this? Because he’s right . . . in the short term at least.

Indeed, something has to jar white people out of their post-racial funk, and it might as well be several million unassimilable aliens creating no-go zones in their cities and rioting as they please. But this funk is not entirely self-imposed. Many of our elites (who are also our enemies) try to preserve it through political correctness, a form of mind control designed to keep whites in line. If you take psychometric research seriously or if you oppose amnestying eleven million illegal Mexican immigrants or have a few harsh words for the blacks who tore apart Charlotte, North Carolina for no good reason, well, then you must be a racist and deserve to be ostracized. Other enemies, like the new mayor of London, have tried to paint this as the new normal. Big cities, he says, are bound to have terrorism. It comes with the territory, so we might as well get used to it. It’s as if major European cities were rocked with terror on regular basis before the Muslims came to them in droves. In either case, having enemies all around might be just the thing to wake white people up eventually. (Although one does wish there were a less traumatic way . . .)

Imagine, if you will, a population roughly in balance, for example, the United States during the interlude between the end of the Cold War and September 11, 2001. During this time, there was no overarching enemy which could offset this balance. Based on the four parameters listed in the graphic below (Pan-Ethnic Globalism, Ethno-Nationalism, Libertarianism, and Statism) you effectively had the same number of the voting public in opposite quarters, like so:

Imagine a threat disturbing this balance like a magnet pulling metal filings away from the center of a pile. 9/11 was one such threat. Non-white immigration is another. From a rightist standpoint, both can be considered enemy action. This is how I envision such action had upset the above stasis after 9/11, a phenomenon which I call “The Amoeba Effect”:

Note that during this period, as the amoeba begins to split, the point of contention resides along the X-axis, not the Y-axis. In the Amoeba Model, societies only pull apart along the X-axis, and those who identify along the Y-axis are the ones who get dragged in the East-West directions. According to the model, the statists (consisting mostly of Democrat voters) and the libertarians (consisting mostly of Republican voters) could co-exist. They may argue about non-trivial issues such as taxation, government spending, and foreign policy, but one side is not looking to annihilate the other. One side could win an election, and, like baseball fans who buck up after a loss, the other side will simply look forward to the next election.

On the other hand, the extreme edges of the X-axis cannot co-exist in the same nation. You either can have one or the other, and compromise is not possible given their antithetical platforms. As long as few people populate these extreme edges and wield roughly equivalent influence, society can remain stable.

Enemies, however, as Huntington predicted, cause people to rush to these extremes. It’s perfectly natural for people to seek company, protection, and solace when they feel threatened. So they camp out with those who are similar to them. This is identity. 9/11 and non-white immigration have forced many Americans to identify either as non-racial globalists or as racial nationalists whether they realize it or not. Internal threats also play a role. People on the Left notice people on the Right shifting Rightward, feel threatened, and then shift further Left. Likewise, people on the Right notice people on the Left shifting Leftward, feel threatened, and then shift further Right. As the middle begins to thin out, fewer and fewer people identify as American, the one thing that held everybody together in the first place.

Remember how harmonious the Bush-Gore debates were in 2000? The two candidates spent much time agreeing with each other and complimenting each other. Compared to the debates today, it was a love-fest. Saturday Night Live spoofed it as such.

This good-feeling existed in 2000 because, before 9/11, the majority of Americans still identified as Americans. Or, if they didn’t, they kept quiet about it. You could pretty much draw a straight line from the America of 1941 which reacted with en masse outrage to the Pearl Harbor attack to the America of the early 1990s during Desert Storm. Today, that line has been snapped, and it took 9/11 to do it. While non-white immigration as well as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others have certainly exacerbated the leftward shift which began after 9/11, not terribly many people noticed since that was the direction the United States seemed to be headed in anyway. Note the reluctance of the libertarian bubble to shift right while the statist bubble showed no such hesitancy. This explains the relative tolerance many of the right have had toward the leftward culture changes our country has endured. It also explains why moderate Republicans like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney continued to represent the GOP during this time. These men and many of their constituents were acting as if it were still the 1990s. To borrow a phrase from Yeats, they assumed the center could still hold.

The one person who has put the lie to that assumption is, of course, candidate Donald Trump. By being an unabashed nationalist who has courted the white majority while not distancing its white nationalist subset, he has finally shifted the Right rightward far enough to offset the Left. And what the Left did in fifteen years, he did in one, which is why many find his presence on the national stage so jarring. And so the amoeba continues to split:

By swinging the country to the Right to the point of balancing the sinister shift of the past fifteen years, Trump has made it almost acceptable in mainstream America for whites to identify as such and intensify their discussions of a white ethnostate. Alt Rightists like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer are getting more attention from the mainstream than ever before. Note the anomalies as well. Libertarian and statist purists have nowhere to go in the above model. The latter consists of many true-believing socialists and Bernie Sanders supporters who revile Hillary Clinton’s corporate ties as well as support protectionist measures to protect American workers. On the other hand, that little libertarian oasis is what has been giving the Alt Right fits for a while now. Fits of laughter, that is. In it, one will find much of the GOP political establishment, the #NeverTrumpers, and the pundit class currently ossifying over at National Review. Some of these folks, if they vote at all, will pull for Hillary because they simply cannot identify as white or will never embrace ethnic nationalism in the United States regardless of their race. On the other hand, some in the statist group will pull for Trump given that Trump is part statist himself. They also might have closet racial loyalties and recognize the economic and criminal threats posed by non-white immigration.

Anyway, this is primarily a theory which explains how enemy action can be considered essential for peoples who wish to seek ethnic identity as Huntington proposed. If one side of the American political spectrum doesn’t swallow the other in a horrific war, as amoebas are wont to do, this is how I predict things will turn out: Two amoebas. Inside each one will find people with homogeneous identities, racial in one (mostly white), non-racial in the other (mostly anti-white):

I predict that after a spin cycle or two in the widening gyre, we will discover that the center indeed cannot hold. We are not really a coherent nation anymore, and it makes sense to stop pretending. Americans are sick of each other, anyway. Of course, the Amoeba Model only gauges and predicts reactions within a society to enemy action and not how separate nation-states may react to each other. This model tells us nothing of whether the two antithetical states in the above graph will ever be inclined to go to war.

So, yes, I believe that without enemy action, this amoeba would never have reproduced.

That said, once this identity has been achieved, I really don’t think we will require the presence of an enemy to maintain it. Seriously, will whites in a future ethnostate require a daily Two-Minute Hate during which we scowl and hiss at people who are not like us? I would hope not! In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Two-Minute hate is a perfectly unnatural form of discipline applied by an unnatural form of government to people who unnaturally lack racial identity. Orwell did not want to live in such a world, and, I am willing to wager, neither do we. It’s just that we live in a peculiar phase of history in which many whites are either indifferent to their race or have renounced it entirely. Once this gets corrected, most likely these new identities will stick. In the end, all we really want is to have our ethnostates and be left alone.

This will be a challenge, of course. An even bigger challenge, however, will be convincing our enemies today that we really don’t need them.