Finding Roots
Posted By Thomas Steuben On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]1,561 words
We on the dissident Right hold that demographics is destiny in regards to race. If so, then it is natural that the same can be said for sub-racial genetic characteristics such as extremism, conscientiousness, and so on. Due to the fact that various waves of Europeans traveled across the Atlantic, the baseline for certain genetic traits among American whites is different from that which is found in our homeland of Europe.
Josh Neal argues in American Extremist that extremism was baked into the cake of American culture from its founding. More than one person on the Right has observed that the current year’s woke fanaticism seems eerily reminiscent of the fanatical Puritan mindset. From personal experience, wokeness seems to have a higher rate among old-stock Anglos than other whites, which would make sense if Puritan genes are predisposed toward fanaticism. Wokeness is practically a religion: It has saints such as George Floyd and Martin Luther King, priests in professors and journalists, and articles of faith such as absolute racial equality. At the very least, it is a dark inversion of religion. The mask of Black Lives Matter today is not that different from the conservative bonnet of the past. Religious fervor is not limited to the Left, either, given how it has continuously handicapped the center and dissident Right as well.
While Josh Neal sticks to analyzing American extremism as a cultural rather than a genetic issue, culture primarily springs forth from instincts felt in the blood, followed by instincts inspired by the land. Apart from the arid deserts of the Southwest and the unsettling flatness of the Great Plains, there is not much in the geography of the United States that lends itself to extremism. While our continent’s majestic landscapes might certainly inspire a religious outlook, one would think that most of it would not inspire extremism. Furthermore, whites did not expand into the deserts and plains until well after religious extremism had already become apparent in America. Extremism can be encountered even in biomes which should discourage it, such as lush forests and river lands. As such, America has an extremism problem arising mostly from its genetic makeup.
What is disturbing about this phenomenon is that it should have tapered off by now due to regression towards the mean. Regression towards the mean is when unusual outliers of a trait in individuals — usually, but not limited to, IQ — tend to regress over time towards what is average in the broader population. For example, dynasties with an exceptional founder become more average over time. What this suggests is that the white American genome has been so saturated with extremist genes that it is not an issue of extremist individuals, but of a new baseline population that has radically departed from what should be the norm for a European population.
Rootedness is another trait in which the white American baseline differs from that of our homelands. It is not as readily apparent as bombastic religious extremism, but it nonetheless has had just as much of an impact on American politics, if not more. And like religious extremism, it is an entrenched obstacle to nationalism.
Rootlessness might be more entrenched in American genetics than religious extremism. While the Puritans provided much of America’s foundational genes, many other early colonists came for economic reasons. As time passed, these economic factors came to predominate over all others, even the vaunted “pursuit of liberty,” which was mythologized as the primary reason why many of our Ellis Island ancestors came to America. Yes, liberty: as in liberty to make an extra buck, or at least to try not to starve to death in a vicious rat race. I somehow doubt many people crossed the Atlantic as a result of principled disagreements with the Habsburgs’ policies regarding freedom of the press. If so, it would have made better sense to join the romantic nationalist or socialist movements in the old country at the time.
Probably due in part to our own lack of rootedness and the proliferation of technology, we oftentimes downplay just how radical a decision it was to move to America. Our ancestors had to leave behind the land which their blood had been intertwined with since time immemorial. It meant likely never seeing their homelands again, and maintaining correspondence with friends and family solely through the mail.
This phenomenon further intensified during the early twentieth century, and particularly the Roaring Twenties. As The American Regime points out:
It was during this time that America became the nation of the middle class and the idea of the “American dream” was popularized. Eventually, the bourgeoisie of the world, often from countries where such a class was repressed, came to America in droves to realize this dream.[1] [2]
[3]You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here [4]
America’s rootlessness may also be in part metaphysical as well as genetic, due to the fact that America’s founding took place when the West had passed from the era of the warrior to that of the bourgeois merchants.[2] [5]
Just like religious extremism, rootlessness continues to this day, and most markedly among the Left and the apolitical “normies,” who are rightfully memed as just wanting to grill. The derision of boomers has less to do with age and more to do with the proliferation of bourgeois values among all age cohorts, which inherently lend themselves to rootlessness. How does the destruction of Confederate statues affect one’s immediate safety, comfort, wealth, or the all-important sportsball?
Rootlessness is also apparent in the center-Right, with its tepid economic conservatism and veneration of Ayn Rand as a prophet. Consider how a character in The Fountainhead states that “I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline . . . What other religion do we need?” This is the height of rootless cosmopolitan arrogance, and the worship of man that was decried by Savitri Devi is diametrically opposed to the worship of life. I would happily demolish all of New York’s hideous architecture for a sunrise in the Shire, or a sunset over Huntington Beach.
But rootlessness is at times also a problem within certain sectors of the dissident Right, paradoxically in spite of our opposition to it. There is a perennial struggle to get people offline and to do anything in real life. In Europe, by contrast, there are numerous nationalist coffee shops, bookshops, sports clubs, and events — and they have baseline genetics. And while we can partially attribute America’s alienation to car culture, suburbanization, and state intervention, there is also probably a genetic component.
Further, while NATO being humiliated in the abstract would be a net benefit for white nations because it is an instrument of globalism, the gleeful gloating over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine among some on the Right belies a lack of compassion which most likely stems in part from a lack of rootedness. It should be natural to empathize with a white nation based on blood and soil, but this may be difficult for people who have never had the experience of being properly rooted in a nation of their own, and thus analyze the war purely from the cold perspective of geopolitics.
Moreover, Americans move on average 11.7 [6] times in their lives, while Europeans move about four times [7]. Just as their ancestors did, Americans are more inclined than the average European to move, and according to the US Census Bureau, the reasons are usually economic. It is quite unlikely that genetics doesn’t play some role in this.
It is doubtful that rootlessness will deviate from regression towards the mean, similar to religious extremism, because European immigrants who left their sense of blood and soil behind for economic motives came in greater numbers — and more recently than those who came for religious reasons.
If the problem is a new genetic baseline and not rootless individuals, is all then lost?
I would say no. First, America’s genetic predisposition toward rootlessness did not prevent our country from once having had a functioning civil society with its own sense of community once upon a time, even if that predisposition lent itself to rapid erosion.
Second, there is currently a genetic bottleneck in which the very top and the very bottom reproduce more than the average. The Lumpenproletariat will always breed with wild abandon, regardless of the consequences. Meanwhile, those who are genetically predisposed towards traditionalism, rootedness, and so on tend to have the will and the means to start a family. The middling bourgeoisie, who tend toward rootlessness, are the most susceptible to anti-natalist pressures.
Third, the act of crossing the Atlantic selected for a number of good traits such as adventurism, creativity, and toughness. Due to the aforementioned bottleneck, it is likely that these positive traits will increase, or at least stay the same, while negative traits such as rootlessness and fanaticism are selected out. Instead of lamenting that our genetic baseline is different, we can turn our positive traits against the negative ones. Adventurism is contrary to bourgeois values, which inherently lend themselves to rootlessness.
Finally, we can establish a bond with the land. Just as establishing a relationship with a person, however, this will take time. Bridging the gap between blood and soil is a complicated endeavor which is as metaphysical as it is psychological, and thus will be the subject of a future article.
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Notes
[1] [9] An Anonymous January 6 Prisoner, The American Regime (Quakertown, Pa.: Antelope Hill Publishing, 2023), 48
[2] [10] Ibid., 51-52