Paul Gottfried
592 words
Paul Gottfried is an esteemed scholar who has done yeoman’s work for the cause of the Dissident Right. He deserves our respect, and his words must be taken very seriously. As such, it is with great sadness and a certain degree of trepidation that I find myself in disagreement with Professor Gottfried concerning his article “Resurrecting the Old Right” in the September issue of Chronicles magazine.
The gist of Gottfried’s article is that the Right must eschew not only neoconservatism but also White Nationalism if it is to gain political power; that is, it must return to being the Old Right. It is not entirely clear what Gottfried means by the Old Right, but one can infer that it is something akin to the Paleoconservative Right of the 1990s as exemplified by the Pat Buchanan insurgency of that era.
I believe that Professor Gottfried’s conclusion is both wrong and naïve, and is rooted in the hyperindividualism of Reagan-era conservative thought. Gottfried is dismissive of the Dissident Right’s concern about intelligence as an indicator of civil and social suitability, and accuses the Dissident Right of wanting our society to be nothing more than a meeting of the Mensa Society. Gottfried points out that the problems faced by the United States are the result of the treachery of highly-educated white Leftists who probably have above-average IQs. While he is correct in pointing out that Negroes and mestizos have so little agency that all of the anti-white gains made by those groups have been brought about by perfidious whites, Gottfried overlooks (or willfully ignores) the fact that the Dissident Right’s emphasis on IQ is based on group, not individual, levels of achievement.
Notwithstanding Thomas Sowell, Negroes as a whole are at an intelligence level one standard deviation below that of whites. Negroes and mestizos also have vastly higher levels of pathological behavior in all areas of measurement. Furthermore, Gottfried’s correct assertion that white perfidy is the real cause of America’s decline does not obviate the effects of Negro and mestizo pathologies. Just because white Leftists support decriminalization of feral Negro behavior does not make Negroes any less feral. A white woman who is raped and murdered by a Negro is neither less raped nor less murdered because her rapist was released from prison by the efforts of Leftist lawyers and judges. The savagery of a mestizo MS-13 gang member who chops off a white girl’s limbs while she is still alive is not mitigated by the fact that the mestizo’s illegal presence in the United States has been abetted by Leftist political agencies and “charities.”
What this proves, contra Gottfried, is that race is real and that racial politics is here to stay. Professor Gottfried may not believe in race, but race definitely believes in Professor Gottfried. Leftists may be the Typhoid Mary of our current contagion, but the sequestration of the Leftist agent of contagion will have little effect if the contagion is allowed to spread unabated.
Let the slow cleanse of the Negroes and mestizos begin apace. After the revolution, we can administer Nuremberg-style justice to the white traitors in our midst. A sentimental yearning for the good ole days of Edmund Burke, Calvin Coolidge, Russell Kirk, and Ronald Reagan is just an old man’s lament for his lost youth. I sometimes find myself lamenting the loss of those halcyon days, but then reality obtrudes upon my reverie and I am forced to admit that the Old Right no longer obtains. The Old Right is dead. Long live the Dissident Right!
13 Comments
Resurrecting the Old Right would require resurrecting Old America, which was entirely white, with a mostly pacified Negro population, with a white ruling class which did not see fit to let feral Negros run loose and to flood the country with browns, and which ruling class was not disproportionately Jewish. And this we cannot do.
Agreed. To resurrect the Old Right we’d have to resurrect the Old America, which would mean limiting the number of Jews allowed into Harvard, Princeton and Yale. This won’t happen. Racial and ethnic segregation is coming back, but it will be ugly. Gottfried wants it to be nice.
I also have respect for Dr. Gottfried. His book on Fascism has a special place in my library. Since I subscribe to Chronicles, I read Dr. Gottfried’s essay a while back, but really didn’t pay much attention. It was obvious that he was trying backstop the Old Right paradigm against the coming wave of racial nationalism, at least in part because it makes much of his work obsolete.
The problem I think for the Elders of the Right is that, ultimately, racial nationalism doesn’t track well with the Left/Right/Conservative/Liberal arrangement that, more or less, got us into this situation and because they carry the ideological patterns of thought created by WWII where the Axis nations were all ‘race-base’ nations of one kind or another. There are some exceptions, of course, and Samuel Francis comes to mind easily.
As Nicholas Jeelvy makes clear in his previous comment, the Elder Right comes from a time where, to a great extent, racial policies were decidedly in place, but were also present when those policies became unraveled. They remain mired in a notion of ‘individualism’ that allowed that unraveling to occur. There is also a tendency all of the problems causing the rise of racial nationalism are due to immigration. This is the game that the Israelis that ran the National Conservatism conference also want to play.
The Elder Right still yearn for the ‘one nation, indivisible’ that the race dissident grassroots have already concluded does not — and can not — work.
Essentially, Liberalism in all its forms — including its ‘conservative’ form — is dying. I respect the fact that our elders find this disconcerting as it upends much of what they have believed most of their lives. However, I also think that race realists cannot be beholden to their limitations.
Racial nationalism (like Fascism) is a revolutionary paradigm in our current situation (though clearly it has been around for some considerable time) and any revolutionary paradigm is going to find resistance from all factions of the prior paradigm.
Your comment about the old Right being mired in individualism is spot on. This is the reason why that tendency kept returning to libertarian/capitalist positions – positions which were corrosive to our peoples.
It’s also the reason why Gottfried is right to reject the obsession with IQ. I prefer my low-IQ cousin over some high IQ person from a whole other culture. I want a nation of my extended family tree – the organic nation – for good or ill.
A New Nationalism should reject both hyper-individualism and the spergy obsession with IQ.
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I respect your perspective and general I agree with you. However, White Nationalism — ethnonationalism in general — is a movement in the US, not a specific political party, at least not yet. Political parties need doctrine, movements do not. Movements need multiple points of entry to the central tendency which is, in this case, race realism and territorial racial separation. The ‘IQ people’ have their role to play and contributions to make to the movement, as do people like yourself how have a stronger sense of ‘Folk’ and no real need for scientific discourse to encourage them to the central tendency of the movement.
Gottfied basically ‘straw man’s’ his way through his critique of White Nationalism, which is sad, because he is an Elder of the Right and ought to know better. Gottfried hammers away at the notion that ‘white nationalism’ cannot work because all the whites he knows are leftist and race-mixers and adversarial toward ‘white nationalism’ as if that is a substantive flaw with White Nationalism rather than simply the cultural battleground on which White enthnonationalism is taking place.
It’s very clear he hasn’t really engaged with ‘white nationalism’ since the 70’s and has not read Dr. Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto. Had he done so, I do not think he would have been as cavalier in his commentary about ‘white nationalism’.
Thanks for your reply, Harold.
You make some compelling points. I agree with you that as a broad movement, it’s not necessary (or desirable) to have a strict platform outside of ethno-nationalism and separation. This approach maximises our opportunities to bring like-minded people into the movement, just as you say.
I’m just not convinced that the IQ question is one that will attract more like-minded folk than it keeps away.
Thanks again for your thoughtful response.
Thank your for sticking with this dialog as I think have a better understanding of where you’re coming from and you make a good point. Is talk of racial IQ off-putting for some people? Possibly. I’m not sure what can be done about that, though. Race and IQ have been part of every discussion of race virtually from the beginning of ‘scientific racism’ and I think the ‘scientific’ part of that phrase is where the rubber meets the road in terms of why some people are more interested in it than other.
I have found that — for some people at least — it’s easier for them to take an uncomfortable — and controversial — political position if they can lay the responsibility for that choice on an impersonal ‘science’ rather than personally owning that choice.
Scientific knowledge doesn’t produce ‘justifications’, it produces explanations and, frankly, due to the nature of scientific inquiry, science is not a sound basis for any moral choice. It is, of course, better if your moral choices line up with nature, but, as any scientist worthy of the name will tell you, scientists don’t claim to know fully and completely ‘nature’s ways’.
I — and many others — of the ethnonationalist (or more specifically White Nationalist) persuasion don’t need the differences in IQ distribution between different population groups to justify their position on racial separation. There is plenty of other ‘scientific’ evidence that the territorial interlacing of different races is not conduce to happiness (such as ‘social trust’ studies).
Today, my justification for being an ethnonationalist is that I cannot think of a single social, political or economic problem that is made easier to solve by the territorial interlacing of different races.
Thanks again for your thoughtful reply. I hear what you say. Being Australian, it’s perhaps relevant that our primary demographic threat is the influx of Chinese over the past thirty years or so.
North East Asians are not a low IQ group, so it’s possible that the IQ question resonates less with us than it might in countries with greater African or Middle Eastern populations.
I agree with you 100% on the idea that people take comfort from scientific justification for socially maligned ideas. Scientists – from the Australian political scientist Frank Salter to the economist Ted Wheelright – have argued that ‘territorial interlacing’ (as you do aptly put it) leads to unfavourable outcomes.
They did not rely on average IQ arguments to progress their ideas, but rather on the natural in-group preference of human beings and the socially corrosive effects of mass immigration. I think there’s even more gold to be mined from this vein. Thinking about the nonsense of diversity being a strength, I googled ‘worlds most diverse countries’ and found a ranked list of the most culturally and ethnically diverse states. The top 30 are overwhelmingly either failing African states or fractious nations on the verge of civil war (like Indonesia or Papua New Guinea). The only European country in the list is the former Yugoslavia, which dissolved in bloody civil war decades ago.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-ethnically-diverse-countries-in-the-world.html
So much for diversity as a strength.
The least diverse nation states are the Koreas and Japan, which by comparison are utopias (give me North Korea over the Congo any day..)
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I agree. Whether the new immigrants are smarter or dumber than us, if they are not of the same race as us, then either way there will be trouble. Folk first!
To me, it’s obvious that in his article Prof. Gottfried is counter-signalling Richard Spencer and his milieu, given his former relationship with Spencer and the mainstream media’s efforts to link Gottfried to Spencer’s Alt Right. I doubt he is very familiar with Counter-Currents and Greg’s conception of WN.
It comes off like satire.
It’s not. I am a Chronicles subscriber and the response by the staff to some of the letters indicate that anti-white-nationalism is something the new overlords at Chronicles take seriously. They are signalling that they are not associated with ‘those people’. They’re not called ‘the respectable Right’ for no reason. In the end, they take their cues from the liberal establishment. I also think they fear a rising racialist movement because none of their education or training has prepared them to fit into it. Gottfried thinks he can just be dismissive and no-one will call him on it because the people he’s dismissing are ‘racists’. The dismissive nature of Gottfried’s remarks also suggests an element of snobbery, a feature of upper-class society that is the motivation behind much of their posturing.
I didnt know Gottfried was back at Chronicles. I know he left a decade or so ago — one of the many chased out by Fleming.
Last time I checked out Chronicles it was a pale comparison to its peak in the early 1990s. A bunch of ham & eggers engaging in theology.