Two Nationalisms

1,896 words

There is a vast gap between MAGA populism and the “radical” Right. Despite the fact that we have common enemies and are both supposedly nationalist, this gap only seems to be growing.

This was recently highlighted by the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who was endorsed by Donald Trump and hysterically attacked as “Christo-fascist” by the media. But Mike Johnson has an adoptive black son, worships Saint Fentanyl Floyd, and made sending even more aid to Israel his first priority. Christo-fascist? More like Judeo-Bolshevik.

It’s clear that the chasm between us and them is more profound than us merely being more “radical” than MAGA. It’s as if there are two separate nationalisms. This closely mirrors what Julius Evola argued decades ago in his 1931 essay “The Two Faces of Nationalism.”

Evola held that nationalism can either be a degeneration or a resurrection. To explain this, a brief crash course in the phenomenon of the “regression of castes” is needed. Traditional societies have four castes: the priests, the warriors, the merchants, and the peasants. The ancients thought that the castes correspond to parts of the individual soul. The priests correspond to the spirit within man, the warriors to will, the merchants to organic economy, and the masses to animal vitality. (This vitality is a desire for life as such, and should not be confused with the “vitalism” of the Bronze Age Pervert sphere, which corresponds to the will of the warriors.)

Caste distinctions are not mere class snobbery, which is materialistic and anti-traditional. Even many conservatives assume that hierarchy means exploitation, which belies an internalization of the Marxist paradigm of the oppressors versus the oppressed.

In the regression of the castes, each caste supplants the caste immediately above it, and thus culture falls rung by rung. The reign of quantity is not mere degeneration, but the inversion of all that is good. It was foreshadowed by the Bolsheviks and is now sprouting into its full potential via the modern American Left. I hope we have hit rock bottom now, with the veneration of everything that is repulsive: weakness, modern art and architecture, race mixing, transsexuals, drag queens, drugs, rap music, and crime.

The descent from the rule of priests and kings in the primordial Golden Age to the Bio-Leninism of modern America is a long and winding path. We need not trace it in its entirety, but nationalism — that is, the rule of the masses and of various forces lurking in the collective subconscious — was a step along that journey.

We have now arrived at the crux of the problem: We will meet nationalism on the way down to utter depravity, but if there is a rebound, we will also encounter it on the way back up. MAGA populism is nationalism with a negative downward vector, while the nationalism of the radical Right has an ascendant vector. One is in the process of dissolution, the other of congealing. Solve et coagula. Thus, despite how we are both nominally nationalist, we are doomed to move in opposite directions.

MAGA nationalism can best be understood as a revolt of the peasant masses against the remaining vestiges of rule by the burnt-out merchants; namely, woke global capital, which mobilized the Bio-Leninist abominations as its foot soldiers to squeeze the masses during the Black Lives Matter chaos of 2020. This is similar to how the decadent, absolutist French monarchs allied with the bourgeois merchants to squeeze the warrior aristocracy. This predictably backfired, with both the French monarchy and the aristocracy being supplanted by the bourgeoisie after the savagery of the French Revolution. History appears to be repeating itself with the establishment of today’s intersectional pit bulls now turning on them.

MAGA is absolutely right to oppose the current mercantilist plutocracy. It is undeniable that the World Economic Forum (WEF), Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and all the rest are rotten to the core. The problem is that MAGA has nothing meaningful to replace these forces with, nor any guiding principles beyond empty constitutionalism and a celebrity cult of personality that is devoid of anything transcendental.

Modern populism is at its core a peasant revolt, hence its fixation on the mercantile WEF and so on while remaining blind to other issues in elite theory, such as racial nepotism and the convergent theory of power, as demonstrated by the recent debate between Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes. It is a well-deserved peasant revolt, but a peasant revolt nonetheless — and nothing more.

It has no knights or priests to lead it, and tends to drive off those who do try to lead it. I of course do not mean literal knights or priests, or some other quixotic idiocy. The castes have become thoroughly intermixed. What I mean is people whose character is marked more by will or spirit than by animal life or economics.

In fact, MAGA is sliding ever further into Right-wing Bolshevism. This is not just an artificial phenomenon pushed by its leaders, but is also being embraced by a disturbing number of the rank and file. For example, the beloved civic nationalist stance that illegal immigration alone is the problem and that legal immigration is wonderful so long as the migrants share our values and want to peacefully make a buck echoes the early Soviet policy of granting citizenship to foreign proletarians. All they had to do was make it to the Soviet Union and become a worker who willingly served the socialist state.

MAGA populism has even come to echo Mao’s “War of all the People,” with everyone invited to join in a messianic great awakening so long as they put on a MAGA hat. This apparently encompasses even transgender freaks, with Trump, Jr. saying that he is now fairly liberal on the trans question — unless it involves children.

The rule of occult forces lurking within our collective subconscious, national fanaticism, the subordination of the self to the nation — all this sounds edgy and cool until we see where such forces lead without anything transcendent to guide them. The individual being dissolved in the nation is a slippery slope to the nation being dissolved in all of humanity, and then humanity itself being at last dissolved into an undifferentiated sludge of biomass. Loyalty to one’s race alone is a slippery slope to mere loyalty to one’s “country” as nothing more than an economic zone and a legalistic constitutional order. This finally leads to racial treason, with random immigrants being hailed as being even more American than the native born. If the slippery slope were a logical fallacy, it would be the exception and not the norm.

You can buy Julius Evola’s East & West here.

Furthermore, Evola saw dictatorships as outgrowths of mass movements. To him, they were merely vapid cults of personality in contrast to monarchy, in which a King actualizes and communicates transcendent values. Both might represent rule by a single man, but from a metaphysical perspective that is all they have in common. Despite our best attempts to meme Trump into becoming a God-Emperor, MAGA is at this point just another cult of personality with Trump as its dictator — and he’s a particularly petty and ineffective one at that.

Evola saw the United States as simply the flip side of the Soviet Union and correctly predicted its current degeneration. American individuality versus Soviet collectivism was always a false dichotomy, as both are subversive and eventually come to condition one another. The individual as an atom is a step away from descending into a nameless, faceless mass. Unguided national populism will quickly become misguided national populism.

The danger is far from theoretical or limited only to the cultural or spiritual spheres. It leads to Communist-style cults of personality and blind loyalty to the party line, logic and contradictions be damned. The Left has indulged in several “current things” such as COVID, Black Lives Matter, and the Russo-Ukrainian War. The Right was generally correct to push back against these current things. But now those same people who a month ago were saying that Ukraine is not America’s 51st state have now remembered that Israel is in fact the 51st state. Finally, they get to wield fleeting power until they, too, are discarded! A few of them — such as Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis, Jake Shields, and Jackson Hinkle — have stood by truth and honor against the Zionist frenzy, but they are in the minority. Right-wing bolshevism has hijacked foreign policy and now risks starting World War III.

If our nationalism, unlike theirs, has an ascendant vector, however, it won’t remain stagnant. The radical Right appears to be leaving its peasant character behind, skipping over the merchants except for a healthy interest in independent business, with its inner character now predominantly corresponding to the warrior caste.

This is reflected in the phenomenon of “fed jacketing,” in which the populist masses accuse Patriot Front and similar groups of being federal agents. Their strongest condemnation is that Patriot Front and the rest are fit white men in uniform. To a spiritual peasant, the notion that men would willingly impose challenges, standards, and duties upon themselves is entirely absurd. It is indeed absurd if the highest value one has is an indulgence in mere material existence. But from a warrior’s perspective, it would be equally absurd not to seek out higher things and to be content with being a bloated, misshapen consumer wallowing in comfort. The populists are indeed correct in alleging that we “radicals” cannot be the same as they are, just not in the way they think.

Where does MAGA Communism, as popularized by Jackson Hinkle, stand? While Hinkle identifies himself as “Marxist-Leninist” and Communist, these are ultimately nothing more than labels and methods. If we tease out his actual policy objectives, they don’t seem that far off from Theodore Roosevelt-style nationalism. Thus, while Hinkle wants to wield populism to destroy the elites, he wants to move society upwards, not downwards. I would therefore provisionally describe Hinkle’s MAGA Communism as having an ascendant vector.

Can any practical advice be gleaned from this analysis? Are we doomed merely to speak past each other? This would be bad for both sides. Populism gets a lot of things right, but needs guidance — while we need numbers.

We can forge ourselves into an iron aristocracy, and thus become the leaders which we, and MAGA, never had. Evola writes: “[L]et us look at the original type of the Lord, a being in which self-command, keenness, unselfishness, culture, honour, loyalty, and above all the qualities of leadership, have become a conquest consolidated on the reliable basis of the blood itself.”[1]

This aristocracy is built on personality, which Evola contrasts with both collectivism and petty individualism, which have the same leveling effect. Personality is differentiation. Many on the radical right are already making great strides towards cultivating an aristocratic personality. If we do this, we will naturally draw people from MAGA towards us. Our two nationalisms are like two ships passing each other, one towards dissolution and the other towards victory. It is my hope that their better people will want to jump onto our ship. One benefit of the castes being intermixed is that many ordinary people also have a bit of priest and warrior in them as well. It is up to us to awaken their higher selves through leadership by example.

Note

[1] Julius Evola, “The Two Faces of Nationalism,” translated at Evola as He Is, April 14, 2016.