Death & Birth of a Nation

Posted By Thomas Steuben On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

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In my last essay [2], I predicted that the trucker convoys would either hasten the fall of the regime if they were a success, or would hasten the fall of lukewarm conservatism if they failed. It has become painfully clear that they have failed. Lukewarm conservativism that conserves nothing will still continue, but in a lesser state. More importantly than an end to conservatism, I suspect that the failure of the trucker convoys marks the final end of America as we know it, and the beginning of something new.

I must clarify that I am not “black-pilling” here. History marches on, and nothing physical is eternal. Things must live and then die so that other things can be born, bright and new — and perhaps some of those new births will be rebirths. I must strike a realistic, “bravely pessimistic” tone in this article to clear the way for a follow-up article on what is coming next. As Nietzsche said, “That which is ready to fall, shall ye also push!”

Since the disasters of 2020, the vitality of the historic American nation has declined even further, indicating that it is well and truly dead. Let us ask what type of conduct a healthy nation would objectively manifest when confronted by certain problems and then compare this to the current state of affairs. The problems that best illustrate the death of America in 2021 and early 2022 are the ongoing shock of the stolen election and resistance to COVID-related mandates.

A healthy nation or culture would conduct itself in what Oswald Spengler would describe as “in form” –that is, like a healthy athlete. In confronting these dual issues of a stolen election and COVID mandates, it would be outraged and it would want effective action. It would produce competent leaders and followers alike. It would think objectively, with a single-minded focus on victory. It would have a sense of common identity that would bind its members together, thus inspiring solidarity, sacrifice, and collective action. We see this today in Ukraine’s desperate struggle — but in America, we see the exact opposite.

Instead, there is confusion, frivolity, and weakness. Many conservatives have abandoned QAnon, only to embrace other adjacent conspiracy theories that detract from the seriousness of otherwise legitimate issues. Women tend to dominate leadership positions, and while I find it hard to find fault with those who show up when many do not, this invariably leads to less effective leadership. The rhetoric is firmly within the parameters of the Leftist, post-1960s paradigm. The aesthetic style of many patriot events equally reflects such rhetoric and frequently makes use of the Alegria/Corporate Memphis style, in all its dystopian glory.

Most strikingly, there is a cognitive dissonance between the claims and conduct of conservatives. Take, for example, how many will assert that the regime is staffed by Satanic pedophiles. These same people will then countersignal a few broken windows and discarded water bottles on January 6 as being “just like the Left” and “not who we are.” But if even half of the things they assert are true, then we have long passed the level of outrage that sparked the Boston Tea Party. Additionally, entryism and pandering to Leftists is now endemic, with many self-styled leaders even bragging about how they were Democrats not that long ago.

Conservatives will still sport garish patriot shirts with messages that read “something something guns, beer, and cry in your safe space,” but then still watch the Super Bowl. I personally know of self-described patriots who despise the Brandon regime and the NFL’s anti-white wokeness, but who still could not muster the basic willpower or self-respect to turn off the television. While my evidence might be anecdotal, it is buttressed by official statistics which claim that Super Bowl viewership actually increased from 95.2 viewers in 2021 to 101.1 million in 2022. Many of these viewers must have been conservatives — who were simultaneously hoping for a trucker convoy to disrupt the event.

Super Bowl viewership may seem like a small and even silly thing to analyze in relation to the death of America, but the fact that it is trivial is what ironically makes it so relevant. Not watching merely requires one to refrain from doing something. It does not require time, energy, money, or assuming any amount of risk.

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You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here. [4]

Consider the following passage from Aquilonius’ recent article [5]: “You will find yourself a lion acting as the spearpoint of a gaggle of sheep and, when you rush the barricades, you will look behind you and find no one but a line of police officers cutting off your escape.” Things are in fact even worse than this. Conservatives have become such weak-willed sheep that not only can they not be counted on to hold their ground at a real-life protest, they won’t even boycott a sporting event in retaliation for the torture of political prisoners, child abuse with masks, anti-white propaganda, or a variety of other valid reasons to be outraged. This objectively demonstrates a lack of will power, solidarity, and willingness to sacrifice.

Thus, the bombastic patriot shirts of the normie conservatives are revealed as being the equivalent of plastic Stahlhelms for wignats. In both cases, there is a doubling down on an ideology that is merely an identification with, and an ode to, an idealized superego (John Wayne or the Waffen-SS, take your pick). One’s self nevertheless remains atrophied and far from actualizing that superego. As Josh Neal described in American Extremist, such displays are like children playing grownup.

This brings us to the ease with which the trucker convoys were hijacked in America. What would a nation of patriots who even slightly resemble cowboys or revolutionaries have done? Such a population would have produced both competent leaders and followers for such a movement. Instead, the leaders of “The People’s Convoy” were a Jew and a Scientologist. I don’t think a single white man was among the principal organizers. The other various convoys likewise seem to have faded away.

Given that they were the victims of a comprehensive scheme of controlled opposition and grifting, it is difficult to criticize those who participated in The People’s Convoy. To their credit, many of them did start asking questions about what was going on — only to be insta-banned from Telegram chat channels. Many were even seemingly preemptively banned for no discernable reason. Thus, it was difficult for the rank-and-file to retake the convoys from the hijackers.

Those virtuous participants who wanted to do something productive were too few. It is telling that the rest of the participants were given two separate opportunities during which they could have steered the convoy back on track with sincerer and strident leadership. I have already covered how Culture War Criminal (CWC), aka Ryan Sanchez, tried to follow the convoy and was kicked out not long after it started. At the convoy’s end, Jacob Wohl saw that it was headed towards impotence, and so he too tried to redirect it towards targeting Washington, DC in such a manner as to cause some damage to the elites who are wrecking the country. As seen here [6] and here [7], he was aggressively ejected just like CWC, despite having good intentions and not wanting to see the event stagnate into yet another ineffectual rally.

Ryan Sanchez and Jacob Wohl are both very similar, yet also very different. Both do real-life activism and are young, healthy, and well-dressed. Sanchez is an ex-Marine and Wohl is a fitness guru. On the other hand, Sanchez is a white Catholic and a former member of Identity Evropa, while Wohl is a Zionist and of Jewish descent. What this tells us is that they were not rejected because of who they are, but because they actually wanted to carry out effective activism and were under the age of 50.

While not all conservatives are like that — and I sincerely thank those who are not –, what this means is that conservatism taken as a whole has decided to lie down and die. It is unable to produce enough leaders or followers in sufficient quantity and quality to muster a respectable resistance. If religion is the opiate of the masses, then politics has become the opioids of the masses: a dreamland of delusions that helps conservatives cope with how devastated their country has become instead of pursuing ways to make it better.

We must not delude ourselves on this. Spengler observed that when a culture passes into civilization and then finally burns out that the people, both urban and rural, become fellaheen, or an undifferentiated peasant mass that loses its identity and ceases to act as a historical force. They invariably lie down and accept the cloying peace of servitude, with great events passing over them.

This does not mean that our history is over. What we are witnessing is the death of either a nation or of Western civilization. I am unsure of which, and perhaps it is both, and if it is indeed the case that “as above, so below,” I see no reason why Spengler’s cyclical view of civilization can’t be applied on a smaller, limited scale to nations within a broader civilization. Regardless, we are not dying. We are not the stale thing that has become, but the living thing that is in a state of becoming. Whether we are a new nation or a new culture, our history is just getting started. Our archaic, barbarian period overlaps with the calcification of the old nation, like the Germanic tribes who lived in the shadow of late antiquity. We live in its decline and may have to confront it, but we are not part of it.

Despite how gloomy this may seem, I regret nothing. We had to try to save the old nation for a variety of reasons. That fight was nevertheless honorable, even if unsuccessful, and giving in earlier would have cultivated defeatism. Whatever happens, we can sleep easy knowing that it was not from a lack of effort on our part. Watching the old world collapse was also a learning opportunity that has made us better. Giving up too early would have smacked of a bad shepherd blaming his flock. And ultimately, while we may act as a historical force, we do not control history so much as guide its becoming. Martin Heidegger thought that language, history, and culture act upon humans instead of vice versa, and I increasingly find myself agreeing with his assessment. Hopefully, we can channel the zeitgeist in such a way that is conducive to our nation’s birth, survival, and growth.

We therefore have a glorious task ahead of us. We are not the last of a nation, but the founders of a new nation, and perhaps even a broader culture in a Spenglerian sense. How many of us feel like nationalists without a nation, or homesick for a place we “aren’t sure even exists”? That we are a new nation would explain such impressions. In the meantime, we should not emotionally identify with nor take undue risks on behalf of a nation that is in terminal decline and doesn’t even want to save itself.

In my next article, I will set forth my predictions on how this new nation will come about, and what some of its characteristics will be. Having discarded the shackles of the past, we may look to the future with an optimism that is free from cowardice.

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