Philipp Foltz, Pericles’ Funeral Oration (1852)
1,560 words
When the story of the late 2020s is written, it will have to address the phenomenon of National Populism. Due to a combination of several long-term and deep-seated factors, the people of the West started gravitating towards charismatic leaders cultivating popular and populist movements aimed at restoring the societies of the West to their former greatness. From the communal dream-state of a Trump rally, to the chaotic battleground of a Yellow Vest protest, the old-stock populations of Western states arose to challenge the corrupt and uncaring elite.
For what it’s worth, I think that the first chapter of this story has been already written and documented — read all about it here. In his review of Eatwell and Goodwin’s surprisingly sober-minded work, our esteemed editor at Counter-Currents, Greg Johnson, counsels nationalists to put themselves out in front of the National Populist wave.
Now this is all well and good, and this National Populism thing looks like a winning combination (and we love winning, don’t we, folks?), and yet even in his counseling, Dr. Johnson anticipates a big obstacle in the way of our support of National Populism: namely, the elitism inherent in Dissident Right politics. Why should an avowed elitist, steeped in the tradition of Evola, Nietzsche, De Maistre, and Carlyle cavort with the unwashed masses, whose popular uprisings have been the bane of Western civilization, from the storming of the Bastille by a drunken mob to the blockading of central London by the Hermeneutic Order of the Broccoli Brain? Populism? Harrumph! I furrow my patrician brows with disdain and flare my chiseled nostrils as my luxuriant mustache is sent aflutter.
It’d do us good to check our premises.
First of all, what the storming of the Bastille, the blockading of central London by the Green nutter gang, the American Revolution, the rise of Labour in the UK, the October Revolution in Russia, the New Deal, Occupy Wall Street, and any other violent uprising in the dog’s breakfast of Leftist revolutions are bourgeois uprisings against the traditional order, or what’s left of it. Indeed, the common folk were often victims of these revolutions, as the monstrosities of the Jacobins in the Vendée attested. The common folk wanted throne and altar. The educated classes wanted their blood, even as they cried crocodile tears about the supposed iniquities the ancien régime had inflicted upon them. The common folk revered the Russian Tsar as the Little Father, an earthly representative of the Great Father in heaven, while the Bolsheviks disdained them as boorish, stupid, drunk, and smelly. And Lord knows what horrific slurs are bound to let loose from the pierced lips of the Extinction Rebellion lettuce-eaters about the rural bumpkins of the West Country, or those flatcap-wearing urban toughs oop norf. The revolutionary hates the peasant almost as much as he hates the King.
Secondly, if we take a closer look at the demands of the National Populists, we can see that they are not engaged in Leftism. Indeed, National Populism is a decidedly Rightist movement and can only be considered Leftist by cringeworthy cuckservatives who’ll have you believe that, uuuhhh, ekshully, Hitler was, like, literally a socialist.
We see a call for cleaning up corruption in the elites, where a Leftist mob would demand the abolition of elites as a phenomenon.
We see National Populists demand that measures be taken to secure an economic future for themselves and their posterity, whereas a Leftist mob would demand seizure of assets.
We see National Populists demanding that their voice be heard by the ruling elites, whereas a Leftist mob usually demands that power be given to them, under some clever euphemism like “democratic oversight.”
Crucially, we see National Populists demanding an end to replacement migration, whereas Leftist mobs are likely to act as accomplices of the elites effectuating this criminal policy (and indeed, this is what we see with the antifa phenomenon). Their admonitions against the elites are not the depredations of an upstart class seeking to install itself in power, nor a fantastical attempt to abolish the human pecking order.
The National Populists here are akin to the son demanding that his father renounce his alcoholism. He does not seek to upend the traditional power of the patriarch, but rather remind that patriarch of his rightful position, his responsibilities, and the family that depends on him. Even the much-maligned “socialism” of the National Populists is a call for a form of paternalism.
In a sense, these are common folk who recognize that they are common and are therefore crying out for their elite to treat them as commoners, which is to say, with paternal sentiment and noblesse oblige. In short, we do not see a movement of people who seek to seize power for their own designs, but a movement of people who seek to restore their country to good governance — the old-stock European people who wear red hats in America and yellow vests in France demand a reset, rather than a revolution.
Thirdly, notice that the National Populists gravitate around charismatic, alpha male leaders. In fact, the success of National Populism seems linked to the presence of just such a leader. The National Populists of the US, Brazil, Italy, and Hungary have coalesced around the personages of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini, and Viktor Orbán, whereas the National Populist movements of France and Germany, lacking such alpha male leaders, have not been able to push forward.
An interesting situation is visible in the UK, where National Populist energies and fortunes seem tied to the pin-striped person of Nigel Farage, who, while definitely charismatic and eloquent, seems to lack the will to be a leader. Hence, the UK has not elected a National Populist government and is instead saddled with bog-standard Tory cuckery, courtesy of Theresa the Traitor and Boris the Buffoon.
That the National Populists leaders are constrained by a hostile government (and non-government) apparatus known as the Deep State has led the National Populists to hope for more authoritarian government, so that their agenda may be pushed through. Because they are normal, everyday people with no designs on political power, they would welcome a dictator, or better yet, an absolute monarch. Hence the many fantasies of God-Emperor Trump.
The blind devotion to Trump exhibited by some Americans, particularly older conservatives, has earned them the monicker MAGApedes, and indeed, were I not accustomed to the astounding lack of will demonstrated by the average person, I would have found myself severely creeped out by these people’s complete submission to Trump. Such veneration exists for “Santo Matteo” as well and doubtless for other National Populist leaders.
An image arises of a movement not out for the blood of elites, but for their own well-being, and for sanity in government. We see a people raising their voices and calling for leadership. What can we — the elitist, illiberal Right — do about that?
Why, answer the call, of course.
I suspect that if you’re milling around Counter-Currents, you’re probably part of your nation’s cognitive elite. This gives you bragging rights, but also responsibilities. You’ve been gifted with a big brain, maybe even organizational capability, maybe even innate charisma. In any case, you probably have more will than the average person, certainly more courage — it takes balls to read crimethink in this age of thought control. Are you wasting these gifts on dead-end careers? Are you wasting them on video games? Or are you pouring your energies into the reclamation of your future? Our nations cry out for our guidance.
Seek out your local National Populist organization, make every effort to join them, and help their advance. Do not compromise your positions, which I hope are nationalist and illiberal, but rather gradually introduce them to your new friends. Do not be hostile, but rather be a leader. Calmly and clearly articulate what is necessary.
The National Populist movement is fertile ground for our ideas. You’re not there to barge in and violently take over the movement, but rather to rise to its top on the basis of your merits.
Since you’re reading this, you are a Dissident Rightist, and therefore one of your narrowest specialities is exposing the mainstream Right for the ineffective cucks they are. This is a uniquely useful skill for a National Populist movement, since such movements grow by plundering votes and influence from the mainstream Right, as discussed here.
Or maybe there’s another way to be useful. I’m sure you can meme with the best of them. Why not apply those skills to leaflet design?
Have you any specialized training? Put yourself in the service of the movement, and the rewards of dedicated labor will follow.
Above all, remember that if you want to lead, your life is not quite your own anymore, but rather, it belongs to your mission, which is to say to God. Among the common folk, you’ll know what it means to be a true aristocrat, a prince grounded in the blood and soil of his nation, his fate intertwined with his people who cry out for his guidance in both the physical and the spiritual realm. I suppose that sounds scary, and I think the dangers are indeed great, but then again, I can hear my nation calling.
In a noble heart, the shame of inaction stings more than the fear of battle.
25 Comments
The national socialists hated the old aristocracy and thought they were corrupted by Jewish genes and money. Hitler hinself referred to the Kaiser as an idiot after the Kaiser had proposed becoming German head of state again in 1940. The Wermacht gave the former king a military funeral despite Hitler’s orders.
Where does national socialism (whose key organisers were strictly mittlestadt in background) fit in to your schema?
It goes in the museum, along with the other early 20th century movements.
Goethe had the axiom: where there’s a great effect, there’s probably a great cause. If you’d only spend as much time studying national socialism as you do the other thinkers, you would find that it is based on real eternal principles and not imaginary ones. It is silly to say that NS belongs in a museum, for if you truly believed in eternal laws, you’d admit that if a movement succeeds once it can and probably will do so again, and conversely, that since the ideas of De Maistre and Evola were stillborn and have never been brought to life, they probably never will.
1. National Socialism as a political movement belongs in the museum. The ideas, aspects of human nature and concepts that led to its emergence are still with us and have to be addressed, analysed and integrated into a winning political solution.
2. National Socialism did not succeed. In fact, it provoked such a drastic response in the enemy that it temporarily discontinued his program of degeneracy just to defeat it.
3. The ideas of De Maistre and Evola were mostly descriptive, not prescriptive. They were describing phenomena which already existed (and have for millennia), thus there’s little to be brought to life. The only prescription I know that Evola has given was to “ride the tiger”, and as per classical interpretation, the time is not yet ripe for action.
4. These guys that “want Adolf”, are they of the meth-smoking or the federal employment variety?
Mr. Jeelvy,
I recently listened to a podcast by Mark Weber at the IHR website where he compared the pre-war years (1933-1939) of Hitler with those of FDR. Weber concluded that Hitler did a much better job of pulling the German people out of the Great Depression than FDR did with the American people.
Any comments on this?
How droll.
Thank you for the non-answer to my question. It was almost like you were attempting to draw up a theory that explained politics at a particular level or something.
Into the museum no less…
Sigh this site really has gone down hill.
I am just here for the Batman reviews.
We have to be realistic about what national socialism means to most people nowadays. This isn’t the 1930’s. If only there was an ideology more appropriate for the 21st century, based on similar principles, and even with a similar sounding name…oh wait.
Look, it really doesn’t matter what you call it. What we’re talking about here are the principles and policies of the NS, not the name or the symbology. As much as I may personally like the Hakenkreuz and the Hugo Boss uniforms, those probably do now belong in a museum.
But what about the Fordist, full-employment economy? What about family and Volk-friendly labor policies? I bet a solid majority of Americans would go for that right now, if only we labelled them as ‘democratic’ and ‘free enterprise’. Hell, it worked great for Huey Long!
What about the Third Position political ideology? Third Position encompasses National Socialism, but it’s broad enough to be applied in a plethora of offshoots as it rejects capitalism and Communism. Nationalists and National Populist movements have fallen underneath this umbrella.
Our contemporary elites have been even more corrupted.
The military and police are a joke. Business is totally against us. The farmers could yet help, but their numbers have been subsumed into the working class which has been undermined doggedly.
We are left with a middle class that wants mainly to be nice.
This is not grounds for National Socialism.
He is suggesting we should meld a new elite out of whoever we can salvage. National Populism is the mass movement, our movement is the one that guides it. How well we will do that is a mystery.
Yeah, exactly what I thought. I don’t know why people want to dwell on thinkers who achieved nothing. The guys want Adolf Hitler and not Evola and De Maistre. Why is this so hard to understand?
Is the new tactic of the ADL to send these trolls into our midst? Hitler didn’t achieve anything but help drive Europe into a cataclysmic war. Attempting to appeal to European peoples, in Europe or the diaspora, with Nazism is suicidal for any movement. Who cares what the “guys want” if it’s counter-productive?
This isn’t entirely true. I’d argue that Hitler achieved quite a bit during his time as Führer. Germany was the epitome of a nation ahead of its time in every measurable way as it offered an extraordinary quality of life and was at the forefront of great engineering feats. There’s no doubt that Hitler made some grave mistakes that ultimately catapulted Europe into a cataclysmic war and led to the collapse of the Third Reich, but to say that he didn’t achieve anything would be preposterous.
‘Make yourself useful to the People’ should be the motto of any member of the elite on the Right.
This is some fruitful advice. A great place to start would be aligning oneself with the American Freedom Party (AFP) as they’re a political party that advocates National Populism.
Furthermore, I suggest reading National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin. This is an exceptional book that articulately details the aggravating factors that ultimately created an environment ripe for National Populism — both in the United States and throughout Europe. Moreover, this publication offers a wealth of information on the rise of National Populism and how it’s unstoppable – largely due to the collapse of the Center-Left.
It is true that we are distinguished from leftists in not wanting to “do away” with elites whatsoever, but rather, we just want them to work FOR, rather than AGAINST, their people for the first time in 50 or so years.
But can they? It seems their incentives of the West’s ruling class–ideological, economic, and ethnic–are just irreconcilably detached from and opposed to the interests of the the core stocks of their countries. They just have different interests. In the United States, disasters such as the the 1965 accidental immigration wave, forced integration and busing, Affirmative Action, and ridiculous foreign wars were strongly opposed by most people, yet bureaucrats, kritarch judges, and Congress went for them anyway. Sure, the proles are not completely powerless, as we have seen massive resistance roll back busing and some of the worst of Civil Rights tyranny, we defeated immigration amnesties in 2007 and 2013, and we have so far not had a full-scale war with Syria or Iran.
But this does not mean the elites will not win–just that they’ll win a bit more slowly. The demographic clock ticks; preventing whites from becoming a minority in 2043, much less bringing them back to 90 percent or more of the population, will at this point require actual victories–not just defeating amnesty bills or immigration surges as they come.
We need to become the new elites.
We already are, in a sense, the elite. I’ve suspected for a long time now that the dissident right is an elite phenomenon, specifically that the bulk and especially bleeding edge of our membership consists of disaffected sons of the ruling elite, upper middle class liberals mugged by reality and intransigent academics who value truth over PC. I will probably write on this subject in the future, once I’ve gathered more evidence.
I am somewhat disappointed that today’s white nationalists look back at national socialist and Hitler’s “solutions” in search for beter times.
Hitler and German state (with their political and economic solutions) would suffocate – the only way to avoid that was to escape forward into WW2 (mainly in the East under real or false pretenses).
If they did not, then the German people (workers, business owners, army and aristocrats) would bring a an end to that experiment soon. He knew that.
Hitler’s VAMPIRE ECONOMY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxwidjWJxAc
I knew before clicking it would be a TIK video.
There we were thinking that WW2 revisionism/discussion wouldn’t be necessary to get our point across, and here we are now. Perhaps we need to have our own WW2 seminars so that we all get straight on this.
No I am not from the ADL. I think Jared Taylor said that name-calling is the most graceless way of admitting you’ve lost the argument. I myself have written for C-C under the pen name Asklepios, https://counter-currents.com/author/asklepios/
On the issue, it is no secret that our people are too well fed and entertained to be susceptible to national socialism. This also holds true for white nationalism, or populism of any consequence. I have yet to see any populists challenging democracy and until that happens they are simply worthless. If you favor survival above all else, you don’t allow another elections where you can be voted out!
And if a movement is to timid to even acknowledge national socialism and refute 70 years of diabolical lies and slanders from the enemy, what is to be expected by such a movent when it gains power and the time comes to impose the necessary austerity on our people? It will not be popular. Is it going to let polls affect it? The incessant attacks in the media? Freedom of the press needs to be restricted if we are to survive. This is just too obvious.
If you are already at this stage worrying about how much our people can take, how on earth do you intend to take away from them the freedom of choice regarding national survival? I am am afraid that long before that happens, the national populist movement will be in ideological retreat on all fronts, compromise will be the rule. They will not know friend from opportunist. Just because it’s core was always made of clay and not steel.
Just look at what is going on in chat groups and channels on Telegram. If someone brings up Evola or De Maistre there, it’s like someone offering orange juice at a bar. Chats start with traditionalists and before you know there is nothing but Hitler and Goebbels, men that are by themselves numinous symbols of the survival of our race, symbols that everyone takes seriously.
Well, then, maybe the reason we keep losing is that we are drunk of whiskey and we should try the orange juice for a change.
The comments are indicative of the “elites” you so believe will come to lead. Insecure bickering and bitching their way straight to the top.
Children of Liberal elites? Clearly seems that way as their narcissism and lack of leadership and conviction manifests time and time again. Truly the intellectuals of the intellectuals in the most true form.
I suppose the warrior truly is a thing of the past. Let the merchants and priests continue to lead for the folly of liberal elites would not once again be brought by their children…. Let them, as their parents have, choose to be idols to a mass of brown proletarians for that’s the only company they truly seek.
The greatest achievements of the priestly caste is the intense organization of pedophilia while maintaining steep morality. Let a child be their moral and lustful outlet for their unending torment from biological insecurity.
The greatest achievements of the merchants is funding degeneracy and anything else their heart desires. The merchants and priests can certainly see eye to eye. Oh and of course banking and usury as well from our fellow white men.
Since I live in a community of 12 MILLION+ souls, about half of them immigrants, and probably including another 2 or 3 MILLION Illegal Aliens, I am finding it difficult to find ‘anyone like me’. I’m retired, don’t have a car, but luckily live in an Asian enclave, surrounded by San Gabriel Valley Hispanics and other Asians. Counter Currents, for me, is an anchor to sanity. I no longer even have any sane posts coming to me on FB. OK, for a solution: I think we need to have lawyers on our side to guide us through how to build enclaves of our own that won’t trip the “segregation” laws in this country. Maybe buy 20 acres — I don’t know where there’s a place that 30 or 40 of us could agree on — and either build a high-end mobile home park, or a 20 unit apartment house, where we could be together without any trouble from trolls. I’m sure there are trolls reading this right now. Well, this is my humble ‘brain-child’ from a so-called ‘white supremacist’ (who has NO intent or capacity to ‘rule over’ anyone, anytime, anywhere!). How do we get together without attracting socialist, anti-racists and their ilk, or without tripping “Segregation” alarms. I just know that if we cannot get together in small physical groups, face to face, we have no hope to carve out a “Nationalist” territory or homeland for ourselves. Just a few thoughts to the myriad of ideas presented above.
Just an idea for CC writers, whenever there are national populism articles, Fraser Anning is not mentioned.
I think he deserves a mention even though he lost his re-election.