John Zmirak couldn’t resist jumping into the latest brush fire over at TakiMag about racialism. A few points:
1.) “I can’t improve on Gottfried’s analysis of what the white-nats share with conservatives—we both reject a fake, this-worldly egalitarianism shoved down citizens’ throats by the managerial state—or his critique of the movement as rootless and reductionist.”
Racialists made a tactical mistake in their late twentieth century alignment with the Right (an “alliance” which has been positively disastrous for us). The Founders of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, were great racialists and egalitarians. As the case of Jefferson shows, there is no necessary contradiction between racialism and humanitarianism, or racialism, democracy and human progress. In the early nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson led the greatest democratic movement in world history up to that point. Far from being rootless, Anglo-American Southerners have traditionally valued their racial identity. We certainly have deeper roots in the United States than unassimilated Catholics with Slavic surnames pining for the good old days of monarchy.
2.) It’s easy to join with people whose worldviews you reject in fighting a greater evil. Sometimes it’s necessary, and it’s always tantalizing. Conservatives spent some 50 years cooperating with Trotskyites against Stalinists… and we all know how that turned out . Looking back, we all wish that William F. Buckley and his circle had been a lot more skeptical about which “anti-Communists” they promoted. So pardon me if I’m more than a little queasy about aligning with another set of ideologues, just because we share a common enemy.
Yes, as I pointed out to John Zmirak earlier this spring, fifty years of the conservative movement has nearly brought America to its knees as a great power: the credit crunch, Peak Oil, global aging, global warming, changing racial demographics … all will simultaneously converge over the next several decades and bankrupt the United States in the process.
3.) Particularly since on both a tactical and a strategic level, the white-nats do more harm than good.
Just the opposite is true. Every conceivable social ill that conservatives deplore from pornography to feminism to abortion on demand was unknown in the days when racialists controlled America. The rise of conservatism, which coincided with the decline of racialism, is positively correlated with endemic social degeneracy.
4.) In paranoid moments, I wonder if racialists aren’t really agents provocateurs, working to help the Left.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. In the 1960s, racialists were misled into supporting the nascent conservative movement instead of working within the Democratic Party to thwart the rise of political correctness at its source. The only perceptible change that has come about from this alliance with anti-New Deal reactionaries is a ruinous increase in income inequality that has immiserated all Americans, whatever the color of their skin.
5.) If you really, really want to make sure that our country is always hobbled by a fantasy-based egalitarianism, enforced by a massive state bureaucracy that programatically excludes white males from legal protection… take up white racial solidarity as the flag under which you fight it. It will be (in George Tenet’s words) a “slamdunk.”
No, you would support the aracial conservative movement which enjoys the official status of the “opposition” to the Left while cynically putting on the pretense of opposing the above. Few racialists now suffer from the delusion that supporting the conservative movement or the Republican Party has been anything but an unmitigated disaster for Anglo-American Protestants.
6.) to abandon political affiliations based on principle, and band together for protection against all the other groups that also organize along racial lines.
Banding together on the basis of abstractions, as opposed to shared blood, history, destiny and culture, is another essential point that the “conservative” movement has in common with their ostensible opponents on the Left.
7.) I don’t want that for my public square.
Of course not. You don’t even identify with the American majority. Why should you? You’re not an Anglo-American.
8.) And as the heirs of a group which not so long ago really was oppressed by our government, their well-being is also in some sense our responsibility. Unlike illegal aliens, we actually owe them something.
Here we agree. African-Americans are native to the United States in a way that unassimilated Catholic monarchists are not. What’s more, Anglo-American Southerners now share many of the same economic resentments against the Right that other minorities now do in the Democratic Party.
9.) Whatever threatens that culture must be named as an enemy and fought—be it mass immigration, affirmative action, or identity politics tinted black, brown, or white.
In the name of Anglo-American Protestant culture, John Zmirak, a Croat-Irish American Catholic, proclaims that white racial consciousness is un-American!
10.) Why introduce the unbelievably divisive idea of group divergences in IQ scores? Instead, we should revive the quaint custom of citing the Constitution, fight for localism, emphasize excellence, and reject the nutty, Lake Woebegone notion that every child must somehow be above average.
Because those divergences in IQ scores are positively associated with poverty and accomplishment in life. If racial differences in intelligence exist, we should be searching for a cure to the problem instead of ignoring it and letting it fester.
11.) Let’s question the institution of public schools—which arose as an engine of Progressive secularization, an attempt to homogenize and tame the many ethnicities of America into a bland, Transcendentalist porridge.
Thanks to conservatism, we already have enough income inequality in America. The last thing we need right now is a dismantling of the common schools which would further promote ignorance and inequity.
12.) Instead, we should revive the quaint custom of citing the Constitution, fight for localism, emphasize excellence, and reject the nutty, Lake Woebegone notion that every child must somehow be above average.
Little more than a rhetoric appeal. When racialists controlled the United States, the Constitution was still a meaningful document, Birmingham was a slower place, Southern culture was intensely local, we produced better writers, and children were Democrats who grew up revering FDR. The rise of conservatism has coincided with the reversal of all of the above.
13.) Why descend to the level of Hobbesean groupthink? We can see firsthand how well societies turn out when people act and argue that way—on the days that the Baghdad airport isn’t closed by rocket attacks.
Zmirak argues in bad faith. He cares intensely and writes incessantly about his fellow Slavic Catholics. His only objection to identitarianism is the threat he perceives from American natives rediscovering their own ethnicity.
14.) They flunked IQ tests. I don’t think that Americans who routinely resort to self-sterilization, in vitro fertilization, selective abortion of the handicapped, cannibalistic stem cell research, and even euthanasia are less likely than the contemporaries of Margaret Sanger to misuse such knowledge as comes from comparative IQ testing—although the religion of anti-racism will probably ensure that the main victims of medical abuse will be working-class, rural whites.
Here Zmirak argues against medical progress. He makes a sick fetish out of being handicapped.