Havens in a Heartless World

6,024 words

Author’s Note: This is essay reworks and extends a couple of essays published back in 2023 (here and here)

“All that is solid melts into air . . .”

The chief values of modern capitalist society are long life, freedom of choice, and the pursuit of comfort and security. But capitalist society is also characterized by technological and economic dynamism, which makes all social institutions, roles, and statuses fluid and fleeting. This leads to a pervasive and gnawing insecurity, both economic and social.

Marx and Engels were particularly eloquent on this topic in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. . . .

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.[1]

Mitigating such social and economic insecurity has been a focus of social reactionaries, reformists, and revolutionaries since the nineteenth century. In the UK from 1833 on, the Factory Acts began by regulating working hours and conditions for children, then extended these protections to women and finally to all workers. In America, Massachusetts introduced the first laws regulating child labor in 1836. America’s Homestead Act of 1862 gave free land to settlers to encourage economic self-sufficiency. In Germany in the 1880s, Otto von Bismarck’s social legislation established health insurance, accident insurance, and old-age pensions. The UK’s 1911 National Insurance Act established health insurance and unemployment benefits. In the interwar years, and especially during the Great Depression, regimes as different as Social Democratic Sweden, Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, and America’s New Deal dramatically expanded state programs to provide employment and social security. And since the Second World War, the welfare state has seen explosive growth.

Yet, in spite of such measures—and sometimes because of them—the liquefaction of institutions and identities and the intensification of insecurity has only accelerated. Thus the quest for alternatives is more urgent than ever.

The Acid of Modernity

What is it about modernity that melts all that is solid? The root of modern insecurity is the central role that liberalism gives to freedom of choice. Liberalism’s ideal is to replace all unchosen relationships and obligations with chosen ones. For the liberal, if you don’t choose a relationship, if you don’t consent to it, if it is not voluntary, then it is illegitimate. The only legitimate relationships are consensual. Liberalization is equivalent to making all of society into a marketplace, because market transactions are the model of liberal relationships.

But there is a downside to making all relationships consensual. Consent is mutual. Both parties must agree. Which means that both parties must get something out of the relationship. What happens when a relationship no longer works for one party? He can always exercise his right to withdraw. But is this always a good thing?

You might be pleased to have such rights, but your partners have the same rights in relation to you. Thus as social relationships become increasingly liberalized, your status becomes increasingly conditional, i.e., increasingly contingent on the judgments of others. But contingency here is just another word for insecurity, specifically dependency on the choices of others, which ultimately means: dependency on their good opinion of you.

If freedom consists in exercising choice, then liberalizing society certainly creates more freedom, but at the cost of making everyone’s status contingent on the free choices of everybody else. Thus the freer a society is in the liberal sense, the more insecure everyone is about his status. Thus to secure one’s status, one must please others.

This sounds fine when talking about giving a fair day’s work for a fair wage, or a good product for a fair price. But it goes far beyond that. People are not judged merely on their performance or their products. They are also judged on their character, tastes, and opinions. Thus they have a strong incentive to conform to the predominant character types, tastes, and opinions of their neighbors—who are trying to conform to their neighbors in turn.

This is the paradox of liberal individualism. By making an idol of autonomous choice, it makes one’s status entirely dependent on the decisions of others, creating a society in which insecurity is rampant and conformism highly incentivized. Hence the need for a haven, a realm where you are secure enough to relax and simply be yourself. In such a realm, your status would not be conditional on pleasing others.

If all relationships are voluntary and their continuation is conditional on how you please others, what happens when they drop you? Obviously, they look for a replacement. This is another paradox of liberal individualism. In liberal, market relationships, autonomous, self-interested individuals regard each other not as unique individuals, but as fungible, as replaceable, as interchangeable bearers of identical traits, namely the traits that please the choosers. What about one’s unique, individual traits? Obviously, those never come into play if you can simply be dropped and replaced.

Increased choice and fungibility have had a particularly devastating impact on family formation. Why do people who live in small towns, with fewer romantic choices, often end up with more fulfilling and stable relationships than people who live in large cities, with endless options?

Shouldn’t expanding one’s options with bigger cities, travel, social media, and dating apps lead to greater fulfillment? Why, then, has it led to greater loneliness? Because as one’s options expand, we keep looking for the perfect bearer of the traits we desire. We keep our options open, instead of settling for, and learning to get along with, an imperfect individual, i.e., an individual who is more than our projections and preferences.

What constitutes a haven from liberal individualism? A social realm where one’s status is unchosen and unconditional. A social realm in which you, as an individual, are irreplaceable. One such realm is the family. 

The Family

Christopher Lasch famously described the family as a “haven in a heartless world.”[2] How is the world heartless, and how is the family a haven? For Lasch, the heartlessness of the world has everything to do with the increasing liberalization and economization of life, whereas at the heart of the family are the unchosen relationships and obligations of kinship.

But we must be careful here. Isn’t there a contractual element of marriage, with elements of choice and consent and criteria of performance? This is true. But the marriage bond is the weak link in every family. Parent and child, sibling and sibling, are bound together by blood. But husband and wife are not, as a rule, closely related. They may have a strong biological attraction to one another. But ultimately, the bond between them is created by convention, not nature. This is why husbands and wives are notoriously replaceable.

Still, traditional marriage always aimed at being more than just a transient contractual relationship between two self-interested and fungible parties. Men and women pledge to remain together not just when it is convenient for them as individuals, but in sickness and in health, in poverty or in wealth. Marriage attempts to overcome selfishness and shallow, fungible relationships in order to transform men and women into parts of a greater whole.

But both parties still remain individuals, which is which is why marriages last until “death do us part.” If a husband and wife literally become a new being, then one could not outlive the other. So the unity of marriage is more magical than real, hence the religious nature of marriage rites.

Of course there’s no real magic in marriage rites and vows. They are only as powerful as we think they are. Which is why as marriage has become secularized and demythologized, marriage rates have slumped and divorce rates have skyrocketed.

There is, however, an actual way that a man and a woman can come together to create a new being: having children. Being born is intensely illiberal, even anti-liberal, because nobody chooses to be born. Nor does a child choose the rights and obligations of being a child: the right to love and care, the duty to honor one’s parents and look out for siblings. These are birthrights and birth duties. Children don’t have the right to make decisions on their own, and parents would be negligent to allow that. Childhood and parenting do not conform to the liberal idea that unchosen rights and obligations are illegitimate.

Blood relationships are also non-fungible. Husbands and wives can be replaced. But parents can’t. You might fantasize about having a different father or mother, but if you had a different father or mother, you would not be you. You are the same person, whether you drink a glass of water or not. The water is the same as well. But you would not be who you are without your father or mother. For parents, it is somewhat different. As an individual, a child can never be replaced. But parents (usually) can have other children.

Moreover, the relationship between child and parent can never be meaningfully reduced to self-interested trading of value for value, since you owe your parents your life, which is a debt you can never repay. Yes, you could give up your life for your parents. But no sensible parent would want that. Yes, you can be kind to your parents. You can also be kind to your grandparents, to whom you owe your life as well. But such honors are less recompense for life than acknowledgements that such debts can never really be repaid. Beyond that, how can you pay back your long-dead ancestors, who also gave you life? The best you can do is to “pay life forward” by having children of your own, so all your ancestors’ strivings to pass on life don’t come to nothing.

Love Is the Law

But if we really wish to understand the family, it is best to dispense with the language of paying, either back or forward. Instead, we should try to understand family life in terms of the “striving” that creates new families and new lives. We call this striving love.

Love is the law of the family. And love is not freedom. Love is necessity, compulsion, force. Erotic necessity, not free choice, brings men and women together. Erotic necessity brings children into being. Love sustains families. Love has the power to bond us together despite sickness, poverty, smelly diapers, sleepless nights, and the long, unglamorous twilight of growing old.

Love is at the core of every self, but love is not rational self-interest. Indeed, love is intensely irrational and self-sacrificial. It drives one to give up one’s independence in the frustrating, ultimately futile attempt to become part of a larger whole.

But love’s real nature is fully revealed when children come along. For what is it to conceive, gestate, give birth to, and nurture children? One literally empties out one’s own substance—one’s own self—to create new people. You, as an individual, are perishing in the process, and no true individualist is comforted by the thought that, although his ego dies, parts of him live on in his children.

When a child is born, he is entirely dependent on his parents for survival. Moreover, he has nothing to offer them in exchange for survival. Thus it makes no sense for parents to understand the care of children as a transaction. How can your children pay you back, when you give them everything they have? Yes, parents hope their children will be around for them in their old age. Yes, parents hope their children will do chores. Yes, some parents really do regard children as little more than livestock or farmhands. But this is an economic distortion of the parental relationship, a distortion that sets up the logic of the marketplace in the heart of the family.

In his Émile, or On Education (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers an argument that the love of parents for their children must be unconditional if the children are to grow up psychologically healthy. Given that children are insecure and dependent by nature, how is it possible to raise them to be psychologically secure and independent adults? How can we prevent their natural insecurity and dependency from becoming central to their personalities, crippling them for the rest of their lives?

The key is for parents not to heighten their children’s awareness of their natural insecurity and dependency. The way to do this is to make basic parental care unconditional. Parents who make love and basic support conditional on certain performances do immense psychological damage to children by installing a constant and gnawing awareness of their natural insecurity and dependency at the center of their lives. Beyond that, such parents also communicate that the way to overcome insecurity and dependency is to manipulate other people.

By making parental love unconditional, parents can raise adults who are self-confident and self-sufficient, meaning that their primary mode of survival is transforming nature, not manipulating others to take care of them.

The Family as a Haven from the Market

How is the family a haven from the heartlessness of the liberal marketplace? The answer is twofold.

First, the family provides more security against misfortune than does liberalism. The family provides statuses and rights that are more secure than those of liberalism, because these statuses and rights are not contingent on the choices of others. A child is born into a family. The mere fact of birth entails unchosen duties on child and parents alike. Parents are obligated to sustain and nurture children until they are mature and self-sufficient. Children are obligated to give obedience and respect to their parents. Such relationships cannot be equal or reciprocal by their very nature. The most psychologically healthy form of parental care is giving children unconditional love, which they will quite naturally reciprocate.

Even after we grow up, we can expect our families to give us preference over strangers and to provide us refuge and support in emergencies and to take our side in conflicts—and because we are adults, they can now expect the same of us. Liberalism regards us as all equal and replaceable. The family prefers its own to outsiders, who cannot replace us.

No sensible person would wish to go through life without the sustenance and security of these birthrights. Only a fool would sell such birthrights—transforming himself into a mere disposable economic factor—for the promise of cheaper consumer goods.

Second, the family does not merely provide a safety net in case of disaster. It also encourages more highly developed forms of individuality, taste, and virtue.

Because membership in one’s family is not contingent on the choices of others, families provide a space in which we can more fully be ourselves than the liberal world, in which constant insecurity drives us into the refuge of conformism.

Markets say “yes” to the “given preferences” of individuals, no matter how base and immature those preferences might be. The family has the mission of helping individuals to mature, which entails saying “no” to bad choices in order to promote better choices—“no” to bad taste in order to promote better taste—“no” to clinging to childishness in order to promote growth. The market encourages individuals to pursue rational self-interest, but it does nothing to develop the self and its interests.

Finally, whereas the marketplace encourages an ethos of self-seeking individualism, the family encourages such virtues as giving and receiving love as well as loyalty and solidarity. The things that make the family unique—namely birth, childhood, and parenting—cannot be understood in liberal terms as the rational, self-interested choices of autonomous individuals. Moreover, if human beings were merely autonomous, self-interested individuals, we would have gone extinct long ago. The family must be understood in terms of love.

How Liberalism Destroys the Family

This implies that the family—and the race—are endangered by any attempt to refound them on liberal moral premises. Liberals find unchosen statuses and obligations revolting. They are repulsed by the non-rational, non-selfish relationships that bond families together. Liberals literally see unborn babies as no different than tapeworms and leeches.

Family planning, birth control, and abortion seek to replace natural, erotic necessity with free choice. Secular weddings, easy divorce, and childless unions all undermine the attempt to meld autonomous individuals into a whole that is greater than themselves.

But don’t we exercise choice in matters of love? We can choose our partners. We can choose not to give in to desire at all. But we don’t choose love itself, any more than we choose to be born. It is just there. We never stand apart from love, as autonomous, rational, self-interested agents. It never stands before us, as an external object that we can drop into our shopping basket or pass on by. Instead, it seizes us from behind, or from within. It humiliates our rationality and autonomy. Love uses us merely as a means by which the race propagates itself. It is enough to make liberals scream, “There ought to be a law!”

Choice inserts itself into the realm of the family in other ways. Can’t parents give up children for adoption? Yes, but in a biological sense, they still remain the parents. Can’t people adopt children? Yes, and they perform the roles of parents, but they aren’t literally parents. Can’t parents fail miserably at being parents, so that others are forced to step in and take on their roles? Yes, but even bad parents remain biologically parents, and one can perform the role of parent without actually being one. Can’t parents disown bad children and children emancipate themselves from bad parents? Yes, but these acts do not alter the underlying biological relationship. You can’t replace your parents or children like you can replace a plumber or a veterinarian, even though relationships can go so bad that you want to try. But the bonds of blood always remain, which is why family breakdowns are far more painful than the breakdown of businesses relationships.

Moreover, in the case of family breakdown, the state steps in, specifically the paternalistic state, the logic of which is just as opposed to the market as the family is, even if the state may brand itself as liberal. 

The Nation

If the family is a haven in the heartless world of global liberalism, so is the nation. What is the connection between family and nation? Both are related by blood. Indeed, your nation is just your extended family. You enter your family and your nation at the same time, in the same way: you are born into them. Indeed, the root of “nation” is the Latin “natio,” a form of the verb “nascar,” which means to give birth.

A nation, like a family, is a destiny, not a choice. You don’t choose your nation, just as you don’t choose your family. You come out of your family and your nation as a dependent child; you don’t go into them as an autonomous adult.

Like a family, a nation is not defined merely by shared blood but also by shared consciousness. To live together, we must be able to communicate. We share consciousness by means of a shared culture, most importantly a shared language. Even shared blood is divided by differences of language and culture. Just as identical twins raised to speak different languages are strangers to one another, genetically similar peoples with different languages and cultures are different nations.

Just as love is the law of the family, love is the law of the nation. Plato and Aristotle, for instance, observed that political life is bound together by thumos, which is the part of the soul that loves one’s own and hates one’s enemies. We love our lives. We love our self-images (this is our sense of honor). We love our families and extended families, including our nations as a whole.

We also form natural preferences for things that are familiar, beyond our selves and our blood relations: our hometowns, our natural environments, our mother tongues, the customs of our peoples, etc. We love our friends, even those who are not close or distant kin.

Love of one’s own is incompatible with the fungibility and equality of liberalism. One’s own family and nation are worth more than the rest, thus they cannot meaningfully be replaced with any of the others. One’s own hometown, mother tongue, and culture are worth more than the rest. Thus they too cannot be meaningfully replaced.

In what sense can we speak of “our” family or “our” nation as “our own”? Our family and nation are not our property. You own your property, but your property does not “own” you. This means that you can dispose of your property at will. You cannot, however, dispose of your family or your nation at will.

You can try to leave them. You can even legally sever your ties. But it was never just a legal relationship. You came out of them. They define your identity. They gave you your first nature (your genes) and your second nature (your language, culture, and formative experiences). You will carry those wherever you go.

This is a much tighter relationship than owning alienable property. In a real sense, you “belong” to your family and nations as much as they “belong” to you. Mutual belonging means that you can’t unilaterally sever your relationship. But in a deeper sense, you can’t even mutually sever such ties. You are different from your property. But you are, in absolutely crucial ways, identical to your family and nation. They don’t just make you who you are. They make you who you are by putting themselves into you. You cannot sever relationships that define your very identity. To do so would destroy yourself.

This identity carries inherent duties destined by birth, not acquired by choice: nurture from family and nation, obedience and gratitude from children and citizens.

The goal of nurture and education is to rear autonomous adults. But no matter how independent you become, your family and nation never become mere property that you can dispose of at will. No matter how many transient, voluntary relationships you enter and leave as an autonomous adult, you still have birthrights and birth obligations in relation to your family and nation.

Even after we are adults, we can expect both our families and our nations to give us preference over strangers, to provide us refuge and support in emergencies, and to take our side in conflicts. Moreover, because we are now adults, they can expect us to reciprocate.

How Liberalism Destroys Nations

Liberalism destroys nations through equality. Liberalism regards us as all equal which really means fungible, i.e., replaceable. Liberalism sells us on this idea by promising us easy entry, easy exit, transactional relationships. The downside, of course, is that everybody else can treat us as equally disposable.

Liberalism promises us cheaper consumer goods if we give up all national preferences and treat every producer on the planet equally. But the downside is that, as producers, we are equally disposable as well, and good luck buying cheap Chinese imports when your job goes to China with the rest.

The family and the nation prefer their own to outsiders, who cannot replace us. You would be mad to sell such birthrights for more transient relationships and cheap consumer goods, as if we don’t have a glut of those already.

Like the family, the nation is not merely a safety net in case of disaster. It also promotes the development of virtues and excellences that are undermined by liberalism.

Because membership in one’s nation is not contingent on the choices of others, it provides a space in which we can more fully be ourselves, whereas in the liberal world, contingency breeds insecurity which breeds conformism.

In the marketplace, you will always find someone who will cater to you, no matter now immature, ignorant, and uncultivated you may be. By contrast, your nation like your family has the duty of helping you to grow and mature, acquiring virtues and elevated tastes.

The marketplace promotes the rational self-interest of autonomous individuals. Like the family, the nation promotes virtues like solidarity and loyalty.

Because nations prefer their own ways of life over those of others, nations can craft policies in education, culture, and trade to preserve their cultural uniqueness from the leveling effects of global culture. Nation-states can also promote the survival and perfection of high culture against the leveling power of popular culture.

The Danger of Civic Nationalism

If you are born into a nation, how is it possible to join another nation? Strictly speaking, you can’t. We call the process of joining another nation “naturalization.” But it isn’t really natural. Naturalization consists of conventions: words you read, oaths you take. Yet such words don’t have the magic power to make a Somalian into a Swede. Naturalization is like marriage: a conventional bond. Like marriage, naturalization only really takes place in the next generation, though the production of children. Such naturalization is possible, but only with small numbers of people who are genetically and culturally similar to begin with.

Civic nationalism is the idea that a nation can be bound together merely by conventions, not by blood. It is the idea that a nation is entirely a social construct. Civic nationalism, however, is organically part of the modern global liberal system from which we need a haven. If you can belong to a nation merely by choosing to embrace a creed, that makes nationhood contingent on beliefs and the state that certifies those beliefs.

Civic nationalism undermines the very idea of a nation as a birthright. Indeed, it leads to the conclusion that immigrants are more authentic members of the nation than those who were born there. After all, immigrants choose their nation, whereas nobody chooses where he is born. This is the liberal fetishization of choice. Beyond that, immigrants work to become citizens, they earn it, whereas those who are born citizens do nothing to earn it. This is the liberal-capitalist “work ethic.”

If immigrants are more authentic “citizens” than those who are born that way, it follows that a society somehow becomes more authentic if its native population is replaced by outsiders, who will eventually obliterate all its distinct traits and make it like everywhere else on the planet. We call this madness the Great Replacement.

The citizen of a nation based on blood is, in a real sense, irreplaceable. He is born into his nation at the same time as he his born into his family. He is a unique product of biological and social evolution. He shares a deep identity with the rest of the society around him. He might die for this country, but his country dies a little with him. Alive or dead, the citizen of a nation based on blood always has a place in this world, simply as a birthright, in which he cannot be replaced.

For civic nationalism, a citizen is not born as a unique product of his family and people. He is manufactured by being stamped with a uniform set of ideas. If citizens are just  bearers of identical traits, then they are as fungible and replaceable as any employee in the marketplace or any mass produced product. Thus the mere passport citizen does not always have a place in the world. He has no roots. He does not share a deep biological-historical identity with the rest of his society. He is not irreplaceable by migrants.

But, by the same token, the migrants are replaceable as well. The fungibility of citizens as defined by civic nationalism does not just enable the Great Replacement. It also enables the Great Remigration.

The Idea of a Homeland

A family cannot provide a haven from a heartless world if it does not have a home of its own, where it can live without outside interference. Regardless of who you think should pay for a home, there is something wrong with a society in which securing a basic need like a home is difficult or impossible.

Likewise, a nation cannot provide a haven for its people without a homeland of its own. Regardless of how you think a people should secure a homeland, there is something wrong with a world in which such a basic need is difficult or impossible to meet.

But a nation needs more than just a homeland. It also needs control of its homeland if it is to live according to its own nature and pursue its own destiny, as opposed to being ruled by strangers, whether it be the global empire of liberalism or smaller imperial blocs. Thus every nation—to the extent this is possible—needs a sovereign nation-state. A sovereign nation-state controls its borders and internal affairs.

Universal Ethnonationalism

I call this position universal ethnonationalism. An ethnostate is a sovereign homeland devoted to the flourishing of a particular people.

Four points should be borne in mind.

First, sovereign states control their inner affairs and external relations. But some distinct peoples are quite small, consisting of tribes of only a few hundred or a few thousand people. If such tribes live within the lands of larger nations, then the closest thing to sovereignty they can aspire to is to control their internal affairs while allowing the larger nations around them to deal with international affairs. This is, in effect, how Indian reservations work in the United States. But even when dealing with very small groups, we should have a bias toward achieving the closest possible approximation to ethnonationalism.

Second, a sovereign homeland should be understood as a right not a duty. A duty is an obligation. A right is merely an option, namely an option that other people have the duty to respect. A distinct people is not obligated to have its own sovereign homeland. But if such a people feels that a sovereign homeland is necessary for its survival and flourishing, then it should have the option to secede from whatever state is it ruled by and set up its own homeland. Once a people elects to exercise that right, the rest of the world has the duty to get out of the way.

The Romansch people of Switzerland, for instance, seem perfectly content to live in the Swiss federation, since there has not been any significant Romansch ethnonationalist agitation since the nineteenth century. Thus they are not obligated to have a sovereign state of their own. But if things change, they might wish to exercise the option of creating their own homeland.

Third, what makes a state an ethnostate is the legal commitment to being the homeland of a particular people. This means that a particular people is privileged in its homeland. A nation is a living community bound together by shared blood, a shared history, shared customs, and a shared destiny. A homeland prioritizes the physical survival and flourishing of a people, including future generations. A homeland also prioritizes the language and customs of a people. They are treated as normative for the natives as well as anyone else who lives or visits there.

To declare, for instance, that Estonia is the homeland of the Estonian people does not imply that Estonians are the only people within their borders. There can be visitors. There can also be minority groups. Obviously, the number of outsiders matters, especially if they have any political power. Obviously, borders should be drawn to promote homogeneity. It is better for a nation to have more homogeneity even if that means having less territory. But a homeland need not be perfectly homogeneous to be an ethnostate.

There are two basic kinds of minorities that live within an ethnostate: small tribes that don’t have states of their own, and members of other nations which do have states of their own. Such groups should be given as much internal autonomy as possible, consistent with the sovereignty of the state and the normative hegemony of its founding people. If such groups are unhappy, at least the latter have the option of moving to their ethnic homelands.

Fourth, a world of ethnostates, just like today’s world of nation-states and empires, would need to have international law, treaties, and interstate organizations to mediate conflicts and organize efforts to pursue global goods. In a world in which ethnonationalism for all nations is the norm, the global community would make avoiding and resolving conflicts between peoples its highest priority by promoting the greatest possible autonomy for different peoples. When peoples choose to exercise their right to form a separate homeland, the international community would work to make the separation as amicable and painless as possible.

Restoring Homelands

How can societies blighted by multiculturalism, replacement migration, and economic globalization restore themselves as homelands for their peoples? The initial steps are simply matters of will and can be accomplished immediately.

First, because being an ethnostate is primarily normative, a society can become one instantaneously simply by constitutionally declaring itself to be the homeland of its founding people, dedicated to its survival and flourishing, where its language and culture are normative.

Second, a nation must return to a biological definition of the nation, as opposed to civic nationalism. As for questions like, “But what is a Swede, anyway?”: these are always in bad faith. The Left never has any trouble defining Swedes when it suits them. For the Left, Swedes are the people in Sweden who are accused of white privilege and white guilt. Non-Swedes are those who benefit from such stigmatization.

Third, a nation must resolve to put its national community first, ahead of the economic and humanitarian considerations that drive globalism. Economic activities are not ends in themselves. They are merely tools of national well-being, to be set aside when they no longer serve that purpose. Every nation must give preferences to its own people over foreigners, and if it does help foreigners, it helps them in their own countries.

Fourth, a nation needs to take stock of its demographic situation, decide how many foreigners it can tolerate and what kinds, and set numerical guidelines for future immigration and emigration policies. For instance, Sweden might decide to aim at being 95% Swedish, with the remaining 5% consisting of naturalized citizens or foreign residents from closely related European societies.

Fifth, once numerical guidelines are established, remigration must commence. For more on this topic, see my essay “Restoring White Homelands.”[3]

Sixth, the revision of borders must always be an option. States should be willing to surrender territory to increase homogeneity.

Liberalism, globalization, and mass migration have rapidly transformed many societies beyond recognition. “There’s no place like home” used to be an expression of sentimentality. Now, for far too many, it is simply a statement of fact. But everyone deserves a home and a homeland of his own: a place in the world secured by a birthright, held without condition, in which he is irreplaceable and free to be himself. Ethnonationalism is a haven from liberalism’s heartless world.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore with Friedrich Engels, chapter. 1.

[2] Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Lasch’s title is surely a nod to Marx’s description of religion as the “heart of a heartless world” just before describing it as the “opium of the people” in his unfinished 1843 work, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

[3] Greg Johnson, “Restoring White Homelands,” in The White Nationalist Manifesto.