At Taki Mag, Chris Roach attempts to bridge the gulf between White Nationalism and paleoconservatism with Catholic charity. He makes some remarks here that grabbed my attention:
White nationalism, as opposed to historic American patriotism, however, is often uncharitable, ahistorical, and unnecessary. It conceives of blacks as the enemy.
There have been several incarnations of White Nationalism across American history from the 1790s to the 2000s. This political posture towards racial diversity traces back specifically to the Upper and Border South; states like Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri which aspired at various times to be rid of their black minority. The most famous example that comes to mind would be the visceral debate over the expansion of slavery into the Western territories in the 1850s (the rock which split the Union and precipiated the Civil War). Republican politicians campaigned for Democratic votes in the North on an explicitly White Nationalist platform of preserving the territories for white labor. Blacks were described as a racially inferior polluting menace. William Seward expressed delivered a succinct statement of this sentiment in his famous Irrepressible Conflict speech:
“The interests of the white race demand the ultimate emancipation of all men. The white man needs this continent to labor upon…. He must and will have it.”
White Nationalism is an indigenous American tradition, a branch of white racialism, that has a far older lineage in the U.S. than paleoconservatism. Northern states like Ohio, Illinois and Oregon once had Antebellum statutes that proscribed free black settlement altogether. Before the age of the automobile and modern telecommunications, the different microregions of the United States each had their own understanding of patriotism. Within Dixie alone, an amazing diversity opinion existed on the role of states rights within the federal union: North vs. South Alabama, the Old Southwest from the Atlantic Seaboard states, the Lower South from the Upper South, the Backcountry from the Lowcountry, the Border South from the Upper South, Appalachia from the Lowlands, South Carolina from other less radical states.