Counter-Currents
Christopher Rufo
2,756 words
Christopher Rufo is an outspoken conservative critic of Critical Race Theory and the bizarre excesses of “sex ed” in today’s schools. He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (New York: Broadside Books, 2023).
To his credit, Rufo has actually influenced policy in a positive direction, including Donald Trump’s 2020 executive order banning diversity training in the federal government and the 2022 Florida bill banning pedophile teachers from “grooming” students — at least until the fourth grade.
Rufo is married to a Thai woman, with whom he has fathered three mixed-race children. Thus it is unsurprising that he is no friend of white identity politics, as he makes clear in a recent City Journal article, “No to the Politics of ‘Whiteness’: The Case Against Right-Wing Racialism.”
Rufo correctly identifies Critical Race Theory (CRT) as anti-white identity politics. But his preferred alternative to CRT is “colorblind” individualism, rather than pro-white identity politics:
Unfortunately, some on the right would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, preferring instead to adopt the basic framework of identity politics and simply reverse its polarity. Dismayingly, a sentiment is rising in some corners of conservative politics that the answer to left-wing identity politics is right-wing identity politics.
I am an advocate of white identity politics. Indeed, I have authored books such as The White Nationalist Manifesto and White Identity Politics, so naturally I was interested in Rufo’s critique.
Before Rufo criticizes white identity politics, he summarizes the argument for it:
The main argument for this position is that colorblind equality is unattainable. Left-wing racialism has been embedded in our institutions, laws, and policies to such an extent that it cannot be rolled back using conventional means.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.
Rufo does not cite any sources, and I don’t know of any advocates of white identity politics that hold precisely this view.
First, I wouldn’t argue that colorblind equality is “unattainable,” especially because of a contingent and alterable fact such as Leftist institutional power. Instead, I believe that colorblind equality is possible. I just think it is undesirable, because it would lead to dystopian results.
Not all behavior is biologically determined, but a lot of it is. Beyond that, there are clear biological differences between the races. To simplify matters, let’s just talk about blacks and whites. If blacks and whites were to live under a system of colorblind equality — and by “equality,” Rufo means equality before the law, not equality of outcomes — there would be no affirmative action, and all efforts to go soft on black crime would be wiped away. Thus, blacks would be much poorer than at present (because of genes leading to low IQs and high time preferences) and even more of them would be in jail (because of genes leading to low empathy and high impulsiveness).
Blacks would therefore be even unhappier and more rebellious than they are now. Moreover, they would not be receptive to the claim that this is just colorblind meritocracy at work. Instead, they would see it as the oppressive imposition of white standards of behavior on a different race. And they would be right. What Rufo thinks is universal civilization is just white civilization, and although other races wish to share in the fruits of our civilization, they find submitting to its discipline to be oppressive and alienating.
What could Rufo do in the face of this? Call for more policing and more incarceration, and promise that his colorblind utopia is just over the horizon? Wouldn’t it be simpler and more humane to simply give black Americans their own homeland and be done with it? After all, black Americans are a distinct people. Black and white Americans are far more different genetically and culturally than, say, the Norwegians and the Swedes, who have their own sovereign states. The alternative is for white Americans to forever resent blacks for retarding white civilization and blacks to forever seethe at whites for imposing it upon them in the first place.
Beyond that, if Rufo were to achieve a workable colorblind, multiracial society, it would presumably dismantle all barriers to interracial marriage. I find this alarming. Whites are a global minority with below replacement fertility in all of our homelands. If nothing is done to change this, we will go extinct. Promoting race-mixing will simply hasten our doom. I regard white extinction with horror. I cannot countenance any policy that promotes it.
Rufo continues:
All politics is friend-enemy politics, this faction argues, and given the demographic decline of European Americans, whites will eventually need to activate “white racial consciousness” to secure their basic interests. European Americans once had robust ethnic identities, but after generations of assimilation and intermarriage, those distinctions have lost their salience and consolidated into a homogenous, generalized “white identity.” If there is to be a racial spoils system, then each group must get its share — including whites.
Again, Rufo cites no sources. But he’s basically right, although I have two quibbles.
First, I don’t think it is right to oppose “ethnicity” to “white identity.” White Americans are not “generic white people.” We are a distinct ethnic group: Americans. It used to go without saying that Americans are white people, hence the existence of hyphenated terms like African-American and Asian-American. White Americans are just American-Americans.
Second, if white Americans are to survive in a multiracial, multicultural society, we need to get uppity, think collectively, and start taking our own side. But I advocate this kind of white identity politics only as an interim solution. I don’t want white Americans to be locked in zero-sum racial struggles till the end of time, even if we come out on top. Thus I advocate racial divorce.
Rufo acknowledges that anti-white racism is deeply embedded in America today. He also acknowledges that racial categories are “useful shorthand descriptors for many purposes.” But this still does not justify “the racialist argument, which is wrong on moral, political, and pragmatic grounds.”
I wish to focus on Rufo’s moral argument, which is the substance of his piece. His political and pragmatic arguments strike me as mere throwaways:
First, the right-wing racialists employ the same reductive demographic arguments as their left-wing counterparts, presenting American life as a zero-sum conflict between ethnic and racial groups, while ignoring the two other essential units of categorization: the individual and the universal. A more fruitful analysis would begin with a full accounting of these categories — individual, ethnicity, race, and humanity — and build a political theory capable of organizing them in the interest of human flourishing.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here
This isn’t really an argument. First, both Left and Right are factually correct that America is locked in a zero-sum racial death match between white Americans and non-whites. Rufo does not challenge this fact. Indeed, he admits it. But he prefers to change the subject to “the individual and the universal.”
Rufo claims that “ethnicity” and “race” should have places in a “full accounting.” But I notice that in the rest of his article, ethnicity and race drop out of the picture, because on his account, all humans have the same rights, which are borne by individuals. Thus, Rufo would never countenance “group rights” to preserve distinct cultures and races that trump individual rights to destroy them.
Rufo continues:
Fortunately, such a political theory already exists: the natural rights theory of the American Founders, who argued that each human being was endowed with “certain unalienable rights” that applied to all as a universal principle; at the same time, they accepted that, because human cultures are contingent, not all groups will have identical capacities, expressions, and outcomes.
This approach remains the best available.
The American founders did not envision a multiracial society. They saw America as a white nation. Blacks and Indians may have been “in” America, but they were not “of” it.
But this does not contradict the idea that all men have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The same man who wrote the Declaration of Independence — which is not, by the way, a legal document of the United States — also wrote that blacks and whites, “equally free, cannot live in the same government.” Why? Because “Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” To use Rufo’s words, because blacks and whites don’t have “identical capacities,” they will not produce identical “expressions” and “outcomes.” And as Jefferson observed, these differences are based not just in culture, but in nature. Habits and opinions can be changed, but nature cannot.
Like Jefferson, I believe that all men have rights. Like Jefferson, I also believe that human differences can be so stark that not all types of men can flourish in the same polity. I wish other races well, but they are simply a bad fit for American society.
White Nationalism is not “un-American.” It is as American as the 1790 Naturalization Act, in which the founders wisely limited candidates for naturalization to free white people of good character. It is as American as the Asian Exclusion movement of the nineteenth century that protected free white laborers from being immiserated by competition from Asian immigrants. It is as American as the Immigration Act of 1924, wisely designed by its architects to maintain a white supermajority.
Rufo continues:
The essential political questions for both supporters and opponents of the racialist worldview are these: What is the proper locus of rights? How should people be judged as a matter of government policy? And what approach is consistent with American principles and most likely to ensure our success as a nation?
I have already indicated why I think white identity politics is most “consistent with American principles and most likely to ensure our success as a nation,” although I identify “our nation” with that of the founders and their posterity, while Rufo identifies our nation with the post-1965 multicultural experiment.
Rufo then adds:
The honest racialist would respond: the proper locus of rights is the group; people should be judged in a race-conscious manner; and the best approach is the one that rewards friends and punishes enemies.
I agree with this when it comes to determining the boundaries between us and them. But within those boundaries, individuals should be treated as individuals. Individual freedom is a good thing, but whenever it conflicts with the common good of society, including our posterity, it must give way. America’s founders would not disagree with this. They did not think of the Constitution as a suicide pact.
Rufo’s credo, by contrast, is:
the proper locus of rights is the individual; people should be judged in a colorblind manner; and the best approach honors particularity while discouraging the formation of racial factions, foregrounds equality of rights while accepting inequality of outcomes, and acknowledges group differences while appealing to our equal dignity as human beings and as citizens of a common polity.
I find this problematic for three reasons.
First, simply allowing individuals to exercise their rights can lead to terrible consequences: the extinction of species and the degradation of the natural world, the collapse of living standards due to global capitalism, the destruction of communities due to multiculturalism and mass migration, and even the extinction of the white race, none of which classical liberals can object to “as long as it is voluntary.”
You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.
Second, if one truly “honors particularity” and “acknowledges group differences,” one would make provisions for groups to preserve their distinctness in the face of globalization, even if this limits individual rights to migrate, marry, and buy and sell as one pleases. Rufo’s outlook dooms particularity and group differences in the long run, despite paying them lip service.
Third, Rufo’s colorblind individualism, far from “discouraging the formation of racial factions,” actually promotes their flourishing to the detriment of the white majority. European individualism is a highly advantageous ethos. It has unleased enormous creativity in culture, science, technology, and commerce, creating immense wealth. It has also created peaceful, orderly, and humane societies. Unfortunately, the very success of European individualist societies makes them attractive to collectivist groups which have learned how to hack and subvert them.
How do you cheat an individualist? You pretend to be an individualist while working as a member of a collective. You demand that individualists treat you as an individual in every transaction, but you do not reciprocate. Instead, whenever possible you give preferences to members of your own tribe, and they give preferences to you.
Over time, as such unfair transactions multiply, collectivist cheats will amass wealth and power at the expense of individualist suckers. But the individualists will never catch on, because they think that blindness to groups is a virtue. By preaching the virtue of blindness to groups, Rufo is not resisting but promoting the destruction of white individualist societies.
This puts Rufo’s accusation that white identity politics threatens to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” in an ironic light. The “victory” Rufo is speaking about is the feeble pushback against CRT by mainstream Rightists such as himself. But CRT is merely one tool of non-white identity politics. Opposing CRT removes one weapon from the anti-white arsenal, but it does not strike against non-white identity politics as such.
Moreover, by pushing back against CRT in the name of colorblind individualism, Rufo is defending a losing strategy that, in the short to medium term, will allow collectivist cheats to continue hollowing out and wrecking white societies, thus promoting the destruction of everything that conservatives purport to conserve. Then, in the long run, it will lead to the extinction of the white race.
The only way to prevent individualist societies from being subverted is to recognize that individualism is not universal. It is very much a white thing, as Kevin MacDonald argues in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. And the only way to secure individualism against tribal cheats is to exclude such groups. But that sounds like collectivism and statism. Indeed, it is. But individualist societies can only flourish in a bubble of collectivism and statism.
Rufo then sums up his moral argument:
This approach is, in my view, consistent with the method (natural rights) and the ultimate telos (human happiness) that the Founders envisioned and that the Constitution and American law have gradually secured. The ultimate criterion of public judgement can either be race, leading toward a “prison yard society,” or merit, leading toward an “aristocracy of virtue and talents.” Choose one.
There are three problems here.
First, America’s founders never envisioned a universal, multiracial society. Nor does the idea of natural rights or human flourishing lead to such a society. Again, all men may have rights, but that does not make just anyone a good fit for a white society, which is what the founders envisioned for themselves and their posterity.
Second, Rufo is implicitly buying into a Leftist narrative about America, namely that the founders promised universal equality to all people and that America must therefore be measured by that standard, in which case we still have “a lot of work to do.” This is simply false.
Third, he ends with a blatantly false alternative: racial prison yard or individualist aristocracy.
The prison yard analogy doesn’t mean what Rufo thinks it means. America’s prisons used to be much more peaceful because they were racially segregated. They became much more violent when they were integrated. The same is true of American society as a whole. Multiculturalism is an inherently violent ideology, which is why white identity politics wants to roll it back.
Moreover, I am all for talent and virtues, but I don’t want to be ruled by talented and virtuous aliens, especially collectivist cheats who have risen to the top of American society by exploiting our virtues and turning them into disadvantages. Governments have terrifying power. It is too dangerous to put that power in the hands of people who feel no kinship with us, many of whom are also nursing ancient historical grudges against whites. Moreover, the white race has never had a shortage of talented and virtuous leaders who are also our own kin.
Rufo’s final paragraph begins with a very cheap shot. He accuses racialists of the Right of being driven by “a sense of inferiority.” And here I thought we were terrible snobs.
The only way for conservatives to head off white identity politics is to convince non-whites to abandon their identity politics and adopt colorblind individualism. Rufo thinks he’s making progress in that area. All he needs to do is convince non-whites to drop a winning strategy for one that will increase the immiseration and incarceration of blacks and Hispanics and impede the upward mobility of south and east Asians, all because the losers demand that they “play fair.” Yes, conservatives are that desperate and delusional. Obviously, it will never work. That’s why the future belongs to white identity politics.
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32 comments
“What Rufo thinks is universal civilization is just white civilization, and although other races wish to share in the fruits of our civilization, they find submitting to its discipline to be oppressive and alienating.”
In a nutshell.
Great stuff. As for the Framers, I don’t think they cared whether society was ‘multicultural’ or not as long as you could exploit labor and natural resources to produce a concentration of wealth. America was – and is – a commercial empire masquerading as a republic.
Whites are being dispossessed because the Framers never made any attempt to racialize the Constitution The Framers had ample opportunity and intellectual resources to embed White rule into the Constitution and didn’t.
They had no real racial solidarity whatsoever because their primary goal was the accumulation of wealth, not securing the existence of White people and a future for White children.
Don’t ‘rose color glasses’ the Framers or the Constitution.
If the Constitution and ‘the Republic’ could have saved us, it would have done so in 1860.
These are baseless assertions. There is a huge wealth of rightist revisionist scholarship on the subject of the Founders and race. Just this evening I was going through some old boxes of used books in my garage, and I came across an original copy (bought used in the 80s) of Weyl and Marina, American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro (1971). I have another book from decades ago on the Founders on race (the title momentarily eludes my memory, but it was very thorough). The upshot is that the Founders tragically took it for granted that they were creating a White Republic – which is why it was hardly surprising that, as Peter Brimelow notes in his book Alien Nation, the first Congressional naturalization statute of 1790 specifically limited candidates for American citizenship to “free-born white persons”.
If the Founders lacked what we would call “racial solidarity” (and that isn’t altogether true: as with all Europeans in overseas territories, early American colonists often had solidarity with their co-racial-but-non-co-ethnics when they were in a position of mutual weakness alongside them vis a vis some group of nonwhites, usually racially hostile Indians), it was only because people back then – nonwhite as well as white – perceived their “identity groups” in tribal (nonwhites) and nationalistic (whites) rather than racial ways. This was an artifact of the interaction between biological evolution and territorialism: the enemy or tribal competitor you grew up with was usually of the same race, and this near-group hostility got carried into the New World, both for Europeans – who would form alliances with Indians to defeat the imperialism of other Europeans – and Indians, who formed alliances with white men in order to defeat ancient tribal foes of their own race.
The Founders were men of their time. They believed the ultimate white settling and rule of all of North America was inevitable. Nonwhites posed only scattered, small scale threats (except the Negroes in the South – which perhaps explains why Southerners were always more realistic about race). But as transplanted Englishmen, they greatly worried about conquest by other European powers, especially Catholic ones. The future religious heresy of “Diversity” was nowhere on the horizon.
For the sake of getting to the nitty-gritty of the issue, I’ll concede that America was intended as a White republic.
Please explain to me how arguing that America’s first White republic intended but failed to protect White interests is selling point for a new White republic or anything like that?
Then you have to explain the failure.
And in politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
I think it’s fair to say that, from what we know about the Framers, they wouldn’t have objected to White republic. We could muster lots of evidence for that. That’s the ‘soft’ version of your argument and much, much easier to defend if it comes to it.
Plus, it gives ‘concerned Whites’ who still worship the Framers their posthumous blessing for wanting what they want in any event.
The concluding paragraph is excellent. Well done.
As you point out, Rufo is intellectually lazy or dishonest or both by ignoring the purpose for which America was built and the mountain of writings discussing the essential importance of a single people with the common bond of blood, religion, culture …
I presume he completely ignores American’s creation of Liberia and what the few blacks who went made of it. Of course it sounds like he is also ignoring the consequences of the failure of that repatriation effort after a successful and extremely generous creation of their own homeland – Civil Rights and today’s mess.
Something else stands out in your review. He is a progressive through and through. He sees America as slowly extending the rights to, “everyone.” However, that interpretation does not hold up. That view would make the, “Civil Rights”, regime, a revolutionary and anti-American legal order and racial spoils system, the pinnacle of his view of progress. Yet, that is the mess we face. That also ignores the issue of a complete failure to understand the founding American system, where mass enfranchisement and heavy over weighting on electoral politics was correctly understood as an enabler of the great evil of mass democracy – even in a mono-racial ethno state.
Of course, there is also the problem of make our centering value individualism. That is just another rotten value that has destroyed our civilization. Rugged Individualism is a great value, but it is not a core tenet of a highly functioning and cohesive nation or social order of any sort. There must be some higher loyalty and explicit, reciprocal duties flowing up and down the hierarchy.
I don’t suppose Rufo at least proposes something constructive like dismantling and abolishing the entire Civil Rights regime which, to be complete would also require a purge of its sinecures and commissars in every single American institution in every single jurisdiction and private entity. If he does, that would at least be constructive. I think that would be a positive that would be a necessary first step toward peaceful separation. Does he do that? Does he acknowledge that the Civil Rights regime had one powerful bromide to colorblindness that Failure Conservatism has repeated over and over, but that in reality it is hyper color aware and radically anti-white?
Perhaps if Rufo’s suicidal impulses have any useful and redeeming elements it would be to instigate a rally and galvanize sufficient ardor to dismantle the Civil Rights regime. That would at least be useful – very useful. Does he do that?
If so, if Rufo were to be a leader in that effort, wouldn’t that be interesting to see the scales fall from his eyes when the highly ethno-centric and religio-ethnic supremacist groups who erected that regime fight it tooth and nail? We can only hope because even if Rufo remains in denial, there will be others who won’t.
I have to disagree. It’s a flaw in right-wing and conservative thinking that ‘the past’ is resources.
It’s not.
If the Framers had intended to construct a ‘White republic’, they had all the intellectual resources necessary to do so.
But they didn’t.
The original phrasing of the Declaration was ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of property’.
America was designed as a machine for the exploitation of labor and resources for the benefit of the owners of property rights.
It’s not an aberration that Whites are being dispossessed in America because most Whites are workers and the purpose of the Constitution is to exploit them, not protect them.
One of the weaknesses of the Racial Right is its abject terror of breaking with the past.
The Racial Right seems constitutionally unable to be sufficiently revolutionary to actually strike real fear into the enemies of the White race. Not fear of violence, but fear of losing everything they’ve worked for.
And the best way to instill that fear is with a revolutionary mindset and revolutionary program.
Not one constantly groveling to a past that has betrayed the White race.
Your approach to history is as deconstructionist and reductionist as The Left’s. The Founding documents of this country comprise not just The Constitution, but all of the writings surrounding the state constitutions, the Articles of Confederation and The Constitution. There is a massive body of writing and thought that clearly show The Founders wanted an Anglo-Saxon people for without that people, the system they created would be meaningless.
In the early 20th century, they realized the importance of something other than commerce and embarked on projects to Americanize the recent immigrant’s identity and to end the mass immigration. Those efforts refute your reduction of American leadership to cynical exploiters of labor.
One of the key critiques of Rufo’s book and his prescriptions that Mr. Johnson’s review astutely relies upon is the fact that the Founders were ethno-centric. Why would you take away one of our most powerful critiques by using a cartoonish, caricatured version of our history – something The Left does? If we don’t have the truth, then we have nothing.
I agree with your ending statement. I am very upset that America has been reduced to a shopping mall and is now rapidly being reduced to an open air bazaar in Khartoum. It is upsetting and distressing. You can’t lay that at the feet of The Founders. The rapid acceleration of our replacement and our openly sanctioned subjugation and dispossession is even more distressing and alarming. However, to disarm ourselves of the truth in a panic will not serve us.
I don’t interpret Mr. Johnson’s critique as cowering and venerating exploiters. That doesn’t animate my response to his critique I assure you. I would say, that if you want to deconstruct and misinterpret the Founders and the founding ethos and purpose of America in contradiction of their own words and thoughts, you, despite your best intentions, are doing the work of The Left by removing any pillars and foundations of legitimacy we have. Claims must be based on something. You remove our claims based on objective truth to the peril of us all.
The problem with your argument that the totality of documentation supports your interpretation of the Framers mindset is that they didn’t enshrine White rights in Constitution You know this but you attempt to obfuscate this rather obvious fact.
Deconstruction is merely a tool. Reductionism is merely a tool. I will use whatever tools are available to help the White race in America to move on from its anti-White Constitution and multi-racial commercial republican roots.
Those roots simply draw up more poison than nutrition.
As for ‘pillars of legitimacy’, where do you think those ‘pillars’ came from in the first place?
They were invented and invested with authority in struggle.
The plutocrats who created and ran America slowed immigration because they had enough labor for the foreseeable future at the labor price they wanted.
If the Framers had wanted an nation for Anglo-Saxons, they would have said so in the primary document in which they invested so much energy and blood, the Constitution.
But they didn’t.
What you people who are so slavishly devoted to ‘the past’ cannot seem to understand is that ‘the past’ has already betrayed you to your enemies.
While your arguing about the truth and trying to ‘reframe the argument’ about the meaning of the past, the racial enemies of Whites are creating a future in which Whites are a slave race.
For Whites to have a future, the White vanguard needs to approach the future with creativity and discipline, not servility towards the past. The past has already failed us.
If you find that appealing to ‘the past’ helps some Whites to take their own side, great.
But in the long run, anyone who embraces pro-White views because of the Constitution is just as likely to betray the White race because of the Constitution.
The past is a weak reed upon which to build a White future.
Embrace your own agency.
They enshrined it in law in a sense in the first Immigration Act. Explicitly stating that they were founding and leaving this nation to their posterity was as far as they felt they needed to go. They didn’t go any further simply because they couldn’t envision the insanity of what would follow barely a century after their revolt and new founding.
It is one thing to say that they made mistakes and could not foresee in explicit terms say, the Hart-Cellar Act. It is another to call them anti-white and secular anti-human mercantilists. The record doesn’t support that latter viewpoint.
I appreciate your zealotry and fervor and I understand your angst. I think we all share it. This is a grave situation we face. One of the major problems we face is the deconstruction of our past and the falsification of our history. That is a weapon that our enemies wield. To adi them in that endeavor is folly. One of our primary weapons is integrity, honesty and truth. If you are going to construct an easily falsifiable interpretation of our history, you can’t hope to construct legitimate critiques of people like Rufo and have them taken seriously.
Our anger and angst must be channeled constructively. If we don’t do that, then we’ll be rightly dismissed as a bunch of angry cranks and crackpots even if the source of our anger gives rise to a morally righteous cause.
I would concur for reasons you stated elsewhere. Moreover, here’s what Thomas Jefferson thought, a quotation which is usually truncated at the first sentence:
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [Negroes] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free White laborers. If on the contrary it is left to force itself on, human Nature must shudder at the prospect held up.
I’ll add that the Founders had in mind that Whites would always be in charge, even though there were minority populations of Indians and Blacks. They never dreamed that things would be otherwise, or that anyone would try to change that.
They did state in the Constitution that the document was to secure the blessings of liberty for “ourselves and our posterity” which is plain enough. They meant Anglo-Saxons and Whites assimilated to Anglo-American culture. Granted, it’s unfortunate that they weren’t a little more explicit about it. They also never put in the Constitution that Martians aren’t qualified to be citizens or hold public office. To them, that would’ve been nearly as unthinkably absurd as the Hart-Celler Act or the Obama presidency.
It seems to me that your position boils down to the ideas that (a) the Framers intended for the American Republic to be a White Republic and (b) they were completely aware of large numbers of non-Whites on the North American continent and (c) that they intended to communicate their awareness of this situation and their desires with the single word ‘posterity’.
Now, my view is that the Framers were perfectly fine with non-Whites and non-Christians having power in America but the ordinary people were not. The sole purpose of the American Republic was to make sure that the economic ‘posterity’ of accumulated wealth was protected for the wealthy and the powerful. And, most assuredly, ‘the Constitution’ has done that job very well.
But the republic has been worse than useless at protecting the racial ‘posterity’ you think it was also designed to protect.
How odd.
My view is that the White ‘people’ of the United States intended for White rule and the constitutional instrument was used to undermine that at every opportunity, up to and including waging a relentless war on the only openly pro-White government in North America, the Confederate States of America, and every other pro-White government since (including South Africa and ‘banana republics’ in the global South).
My view is that the Framers got what they wanted – An empire the protected accumulated wealth – and did not get what they didn’t care about: A homeland for White people outside Europe.
It doesn’t matter what the Framers intended, not really.
It matters that they created a machine that delivered the exact opposite of what you claim they intended (White rule) and over-delivered on the things I’m saying they really cared about (protection of accumulated wealth).
The left has the real will to power in American politics.
The left knows it’s enough to say ‘This is what we want’ and then fight.
The right spends all its time looking for ‘justifications’ from ‘the past’.
The right never studies the left enough to understand to use their own tools against them or to invent effective counters to the left’s maneuvering.
Consequently, the right always loses to the left.
This is why the pro-White movement needs to stop being a ‘right wing’ movement.
Whites cannot afford to have the future dependent upon the success of a political ideology whose record of failure spans over 500 years.
Well said, Beau Albrecht.
Plaudets to Arminius and Hamburger on their mini debate! Well argued on both sides.
I agree with you that it is a good discussion. I also agree with Arminius about the substance of the issue.
“American Americans”. Simply brilliant. I’ll be liberating it in the name of the People. As far as giving black Americans their own homeland, I’ve been advocating that since about 1970. But what to do with all the (Subcontinental) Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Middle Easterners, actual Sub-Saharan Africans, Somalis, and 57 varieties of Latin Americans? Fifty years ago, a simple divorce would have sufficed. Things are a lot more complicated now. And it might not be American Americans who are doing the division of property.
See my essay “Restoring White Homelands”: https://counter-currents.com/2021/06/restoring-white-homelands/
I have forwarded the audio version of Greg Johnson’s essay to three people recently.
It is a short and rational essay about the issue wherein he suggests realistic and reasonable solutions to restoring White homelands.
But I do wonder how some of the suggestions would work (or not work) knowing that there will most likely be chaos and violence in this country within the next few years (within a decade), and Whites may have to act faster and more forcefully (at least immediately following the collapse of the country).
One of your best ever, Greg. I’m sorry you had to slog through so much pseudo-libertarian-civic-nationalist drivel to write it. I was initially surprised to see the title, since Rufo usually presents himself as civnat social-conservative, whacking away at low-hanging fruit that’s too rotten and wormy to take seriously. What would he know about white identity politics?
Moreover he’s associated with the Manhattan Institute, an outfit that seems to exist purely to distract the chumps with ephemeral problems and tendentious arguments, while meantime our nation and culture go down the crapper. The classic Con Inc. routine! Even Heather Mac Donald, who seems pretty clearheaded and honest, is unable to frame an argument that addresses the fundamentals of race. In her War Against Cops, the inner-city blacks are simply misguided and misinformed; they don’t understand that the police are there to help them.
Just perfect that Rufo’s married to a nonwhite and has mixed-race children. Was that all a well-planned ruse so he could say, “Hey I’m not a rayciss, I’ve got me a Siamese wife and hapa children,” or is it maybe a beard to hide something else? I always wonder in these situations. Because I’m that nasty.
With regard to Rufo, Hanania and MacDonald (Heather, not Kevin), I suppose I am a glass half-full kind o’ guy. At least we have people with mainstream platforms criticizing the civil rights acts and at least some degree of anti-whiteness.
Indeed, and that’s my usual mainstream-normie reaction. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
A lame Manhattan Institute-constricted POV might at least do a little good, around the edges, and moreover encourager les autres. After all, so many of us began as libertarians or even Randians, because such ideologies looked like useful duckblinds.
This is a highly discerning forum and perhaps many of us overstate our case. But we’re generally not addressing the normies.
Thanks Margot. I don’t like like journalists, and I don’t like repeating myself, so writing it felt like a slog. But I must always remind myself that repetition is part of education, that for any number of readers, this is their first exposure to these ideas, and that responding to criticisms by people like Rufo is an important way in which our ideas will grow.
These race-mixers should have to state that in their résumé because they are the most invested in the continuity of this imaginary utopia. How creepy is it to have kids that look nothing like you?
Greg’s piece unearths and hits all the necessary points and in all the right registers.
I engaged briefly with some of Rufo’s supporters on the City Journal site. Again I see the phenomenon of White conservatives exploding in response to any overtly pro-White stance. I am tempted to say that nothing makes them more irate, even vengeful. Which shows the terrible effectiveness of all the post-WW2 conditioning.
However, there were a number of critics there as well who took Rufo to task for his dream world of non-racial individualist meritocracy.
Conservatives, especially older ones, are bitter clingers to their civic nationalist illusions. They have to make multiculturalism work, because contemplating the alternative is just too terrifying to them.
Excellent essay, but I have a quibble. I think what my generation of conservatives wants to work is multiracialism – the idea that self-chosen beliefs and allegiances are more powerful than genetic interest. That E pluribus unum is not a fantasy. Such normiecons would argue, however, that multiculturalism is the opposite of colorblind individualism. It is part of the constellation of ‘groupist’ ideologies that normiecons think they’re opposing. I do agree that, long term, survival and justice for whites can only be achieved via countervailing white identitarianism. I’ve always believed this. Indeed, while the purpose of white nationalism is to prevent white extinction and protect white interests, a powerful WN movement would, ironically, strengthen the possibility of a successful multiracialism, as it would, in a Madisonian sort of way, exert an opposite pull against the fissiparousness engendered by the ‘intersectional’ Left. Colorblind individualism would be the final possibility among contending racial nationalist factions (how stupid whites were to put their descendants in this unenviable position, esp when we used to hold all the cards).
What Christopher Rufo is unable to answer is “why has the civic nationalism which has been promoted by many conservatives failed?”
Therein lies the dilemma.
If civic nationalism could work, it would have done so by now. People with big platforms, like Glenn Beck, saw their dreams of a colorblind society go down in (literal) flames during the summer of 2020. Dr Johnson’s article points out some of the reasons for this failure, reasons which were well understood going back to at least the time of Thomas Jefferson.
Supposing that the Rufo sector were to end affirmative action and cancel CRT indoctrination. All this would do is reset things to where they were at, say, around the year 1980. But since 1980 did not stop the anti-White march through the institutions, a generation down the line White people would find themselves faced with the same threat of dispossession.
Many in academia, media and now the Beltway view the US Constitution as a “slaveholder document” and an “instrument of White Supremacy.” To change this perspective would require a massive propaganda and activist effort, not to mention terminating the employment of thousands of thought leaders.
And even if civic nationalists could somehow regain control of the institutions, they would go up against the biological realities of racial differences. How would they deal with non-White activist groups which promote their own race based interests?
Just consider how civic nationalist devotion to the US Constitution has failed and failed miserably to secure the basic right to Free Speech on the campuses, along social media and increasingly in the public square.
The real answer is in forming a pro-White advocacy group and allied institutions, as noted elsewhere on C-C.
This is not to say that Rufo is entirely wasting his time. He is to be commended for at least recognizing the threat of anti-White agitprop and policies. And perhaps opening the way for WN to move into the mainstream.
I’ve been wondering whether America will have to go through a segregation phase again to proceed to repatriation, or if we can just skip a segregation phase.
Heck, I’m in favor of whatever works. Time will tell on that. Perhaps different approaches will be needed for different populations.
White America – a real nation, as Dr. Johnson argues – will only be saved by the Ethnostate, which will only come about via a mass territorial ingathering of prowhites into a few contiguous Red States where we can eventually dominate the state politics, and set the ethnocultural ‘tone’. That is the obvious, essential precondition. Some might argue that the dream of a resurrected White America could be passed down the white generations like the Jewish dream of Zion, destined to be realized at some far future date. I find the analogy weak, if only because the Jews a) are, unfortunately, vastly more ethnocentric by nature than most whites, and b) have an ethnoreligion (with its attendant comprehensive worldview and large set of tribal customs), while we do not. I believe that, sans Ethnostate, whites will continue to miscegenate out of racial existence, while those remaining race-pure, though becoming ever more race-consciousness, will also find themselves increasingly politically (and, eventually, juridically) impotent, and then actively persecuted.
There is no foreseeable possibility that whites will reconquer and then re-whiten the whole of North America. That should become the dream of Americans, to be nurtured “with mothers’ milk” down the ages. At best, we can recolonize a portion of what was once our land, and make of it a real home for our people. Perhaps, after two or three centuries of rigorous racial statism, our people will be sufficiently numerous and strong to begin taking back what their ancestors so fecklessly frittered away.
If the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia teaches us anything is that nationalism can go from zero to sixty very fast. I think once the critical mass of boomers holding things together is gone, things will get very interesting.
Great discussion between ArminiusMaximus and Hamburger Today in the comments here.
But I think ArminiusMaximus is correct.
I think there are plenty of good things about City Journal. I know some easily dismiss them as watered down. But on many issues they are making the same case as what is said here… but they know how to do it within the confines of the Overton Window. Plenty of the writing and comments here would not need much sprucing to be more acceptable to a broader audience. Maybe Rufo has the right approach. Or maybe he doesn’t and after trying that out people will consider different ideas.
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