Dixie
Jared Taylor has penned a wonderful new essay for VDARE on Southern nationalism. My thoughts are also on “the War” this evening.
150 years ago, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter (wouldn’t it be nice if they did so again?), which was the official beginning of the “War Between the States” or the “War of Northern Aggression,” as it has traditionally been called around here.
In the American North, the “War Between the States” is still called the “Civil War,” although Southerners have always disputed that mischaracterization. It was never our object to seize control of the federal government in Washington and rule over the Yankees of New England.
The “War Between the States” was a “civil war” in the South, especially in states like Missouri, in the sense that it divided Southerners into “patriots” and “loyalists.” Thousands of Southerners fought for the Union against other Southerners who fought for the Confederacy.
This was also true of the American Revolution.
During the American Revolution, Southerners divided into “patriot” and “loyalist” militias. If you have ever seen Mel Gibson’s movie “The Patriot,” the “loyalists” in that film massacre their “patriot” neighbors in the South Carolina backcountry.
Like the Lincoln administration, the British attempted to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia as a war measure to crush the secessionist rebellion against the British constitution in the Southern colonies, but they were unsuccessful in that endeavor.
For some reason, Yankee historians never call the American Revolution a war over slavery, but instead prefer to describe that conflict as a dispute over taxation, sovereignty, and self government, even when it became clear that the Continental Army was fighting for the preservation and extension of slavery in North America.
The British who lived back then made all those points about Yankee hypocrisy at the time:
(1) Wasn’t George Washington a traitor and a rebel like Robert E. Lee?
(2) Even if slavery was the occasion of the conflict (like taxes were in the American Revolution), weren’t the 13 Confederate states ultimately fighting for independence like the 13 American colonies?
(3) Hadn’t the Union presided over the expansion of slavery across North America which Britain and France had opposed?
(4) Wasn’t the capitol of the Union named after a traitor?
(5) Weren’t the Founding Fathers all rebels and traitors like the Confederates?
All this seemed obvious to foreign observers. It seems less significant to contemporary historians.
Southern Nation
I’m quite sure that Jared Taylor would agree with all the Southern apologetics above.
We are both racially conscious White Americans, but beyond that, we share more in common than grievances and abstractions: ethnicity, culture, history, tradition, a sense of place, myths, heroes, and symbols.
How else can I describe it? An ethnic Southerner is someone whose worldview is oriented around a sense of place. You can read about your history, tour a battlefield, look at a particular flag or a monument and it means something to you.
Maybe your sense of anxiety or relief grows as your distance increases from some central location. It is an intuitive sense that some people in some areas, even complete strangers, are familiar in a way that you can relate to them whereas others are not.
Every Southerner knows it goes well beyond politics and Waffle House into non-verbal cues. Confederates and anti-Confederates, slaveowners and non-slaveholders, Whigs and Democrats felt that way. All of these groups could tell you when a Yankee has violated our unspoken code of propriety.
We dislike everything from miscegenation to immigration to urban sprawl to communism because it violates that sense of place in a fundamental way. You don’t have a gut reaction to Heidi Klum and Seal making out because you have read the Bell Curve.
A deracinated White libertarian can look at interracial pornography and see it as nothing more than a fine example of free enterprise creating economic growth in Southern California, but it horrifies an ethnic Southerner in much the same way that the progressive residents of the West Coast might freak out about Sarah Palin gunning down a caribou in Alaska.
Race is a marker of Southern ethnicity. Environmentalism is a marker of West Coast ethnicity. It defines us.
We are not blacks, Mexicans, or Yankees. A Southerner can look at a city like Baltimore or Detroit and see what a Southern city doesn’t and shouldn’t look like. Georgians are uneasy about Atlanta in the same way they used to feel about New York City.
Atlanta is a mongrelized place where the hierarchy is violated. It moves fast whereas we prefer to take things slow. It is paved over whereas we prefer wide open spaces.
The SWPL eco-snobs in San Francisco and Portland look down at Los Angeles and see the polar opposite of their Earth Day based civilization. Yankees look at the Deep South and see a Bible Belt of ignorant evangelical zealots. Southerners look at Yankees and see insufferable hypocrites drunk on abstractions.
The Nation of Immigrants, which a Southerner can reach from Virginia by traveling north on I-95, or a Yankee can reach by traveling south from New Hampshire, sees itself as the Real America.
Maybe it is. I don’t really care.
Overculture/Underculture
The South isn’t what it used to be.
We have been invaded in countless ways: by illegal aliens swimming across the Rio Grande or washing up in South Florida, by legal immigrants from Asia which now seem to own every gas station in the South, by Yankees moving South in search of jobs and a milder climate, by blacks moving back to the South from the North.
The Americanization of Dixie goes on 24/7/365 through television, radio, print, internet, and social media. It has been carried out through the public school system, the churches, the universities, Supreme Court decisions, acts of Congress, and newspapers which have been snapped up by corporate conglomerates.
The interstate transportation system has stretched its tentacles across Dixie from Virginia to Texas. The satellites beam their invisible signals of homogenizing content into every Southern household. The air conditioner has removed the geographic barrier of climate to foreign settlement.
I’ve always seen the “culture war” as an internal clash within the South between a thin foreign American “overculture,” the political correctness and Hollywood pop culture being imposed on the South by outsiders, and the deeper indigenous “underculture” which are the ancient conservative folkways of Dixie.
In my hometown, you can walk six miles through the courtly Antebellum mansions and trees of the historic district past the Confederate monument in the center of town and beyond that to the commercial highway strip of fast food joints and discount retail stores that have grown up here since the 1960s.
You can enter any Wal-Mart in the American South and see the “culture war” in action. I often find myself classifying the people that I encounter on an everyday basis by their cultural allegiances. The whiggers, race mixers, and people who disfigure their bodies with tattoos and piercings can be written off to the overculture.
The majority of White Southerners are still recognizably Southern in their way of life. In spite of all these changes, Georgia is still like Alabama. North Carolina is still like Virginia. Dixie is still conservative and politically at odds with New England. Some things never change.
The Confederate flag is still a contentious issue in Georgia and South Carolina. As we saw recently, interracial marriage is still a polarizing issue in Mississippi.
You could say without much exaggeration that the last fifty years of Southern political history has been a reaction by the natives to the Americanization of Dixie and a sectional contest with other parts of the Union over economic development.
Prospects for Nationalism
Admittedly, the prospects for Southern nationalism are dim.
It is easier to take stock of all that has been lost than it is to identify what remains of the Southern way of life and move forward. The case for Southern nationalism always seems to boil down to arguments over whether the glass is half full or half empty.
Let’s take an optimistic view:
(1) The South is full of millions of blacks, but since when has that not been the case? Southerners have always lived in a multiracial society.
In 1910, something like 90 percent of American blacks lived in the South, whereas in 2011 only about 57 percent of them do. South Carolina and Mississippi once had black majorities.
Blacks are now moving back to the South, but at nothing like the rate which suggests that all of them are returning here. The influx of blacks into the South will increase racial conflict over scarce resources and stimulate White racial consciousness.
As hard as it is to believe, many parts of the American South are whiter today than they have been in the recent past. Your great-great grandfather lived in a more racially diverse society than you do.
(2) The invasion of Hispanics across the Mexican border has the side effect of stirring the embers of White racial consciousness. Every Southern state has taken a crack at immigration reform this year.
Human beings define their identity against out groups. It was the presence of blacks, Indians, and Hispanics in the South that made White identity meaningful.
That is why White racial consciousness endured in the South much longer than in other parts of America. Diversity was the secret of our success.
Dixie has always been a binary system when it comes to racial and cultural identity.
(3) The Americanization of Dixie is just as disorienting to White Southerners as illegal immigration and internal black migration within the United States.
This disorientation results in alienation – which has always been like oxygen to the flames of nationalism and conservatism. It is usually the unsettling periods of human history that produce the great breakthroughs in social identity.
The golden age of Southern nationalism wasn’t 1861 to 1865. It was the 1880s and 1890s when the Jim Crow system was created.
The Confederacy was a league of sovereign states. It neither saw itself as a nation or acted much like one. The term refers to a form of government. The South only became a nation after Appomattox when the negro and his carpetbagger allies were installed in power during Reconstruction.
That was when the Confederate flag became the Southern flag, the War Between the States became the Lost Cause, the Klan rose, the monuments were raised in every town square, and Robert E. Lee became Joan of Arc to the Solid South.
In hindsight, after thirty disorienting years of the bloodiest war in history, a military occupation, Radical Reconstruction, negro equality, industrialization, and the spread of sharecropping, the old differences between White Southerners must have seemed far less significant than the similarities.
You could look back at the fights between Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay and wonder what planet they were living on.
We are going through a similar disorienting crisis in our own times. It calls for a similar project of nation building. Now is an excellent time to turn to conservatism and tradition. White people are looking for a meaningful sense of identity and we have one to offer them.
The South and White Nationalism
Like the French or the Irish, this is where Southern Nationalists have a clear advantage over White Nationalists.
White Nationalists have grievances and abstractions. They don’t find the decompiled Americanism and the side order of White guilt being served at the multiculturalist buffet to be all that fulfilling as a source of identity.
Aside from their grievances and abstractions, White Nationalists don’t have much else in common with each other. White Southerners have those things, but we have a nation, a people, a culture, a history, an ethnic identity, shared genes and many other things to fall back on and draw strength from.
A White ethnostate is an idea. Dixie is a place with graveyards. You can draw lines around it on a map, drive through it, taste it, and see it with your own eyes. That is a winning hand to the folks we need to attract.
We are not starting from scratch here. This idea already has an audience. The countless number of things we have in common with our own people makes our persuasive task much easier. It also has the beneficial effect of keeping infighting to a minimum.
As Jared Taylor said, independence is there for any group of Americans that is united in its determination to take it, but I would argue that the more homogeneous groups are in a stronger position to win that race.
I thought Taylor was born in Japan, and lived there for the first 16 years of his life?
A guy who can’t even put on a private academic meeting, isn’t going to have too much luck taking a State out of the United States.
If I was expected to move mountains by myself, I wouldn’t have much success either. I have already shared my thoughts on the 2010 and 2011 Amren conferences.
There is nothing that Jared Taylor is doing that is by itself a bad thing. He is one of the few people who are presentable in the White Nationalist movement. Taylor is also one of the few people that has built an institution that has consistently put out a high quality product for two decades.
What do you expect him to be? Superman?
Whites are losing their rights because they are cowed into submission by political correctness, not because of what Jared Taylor is doing, which is far more than most people who are involved in the White Nationalist movement.
If Jared Taylor died tomorrow, White Nationalists would continue to lose their rights. They have a surfeit of “ideas” but lack the courage and homogeneity to act on them.
I’m sure the next day they would be on the internet navel gazing over what Friedrich Nietzsche said a hundred years ago or what Hitler should have done in the 1940s.
All the SNs trip over “anti-racism” they take it at face value and get rolled every time, they are for the most part a waste of time especially the LOS. Here is there basic shtick, talk loudly about some wordism, get called “racist” backpeddle into universalism so as to not lose the “wimmin” and then plead for money. 15 years of sending money to Michael Hill, been there done that.
I’ve never been a member of the League of the South.
When I was living in Virginia, I remember Tom Sunic interviewed Michael Hill. He praised Kevin MacDonald and Sam Dickson. There is a post about the interview somewhere in the archives.
In any case, the number of White Southerners who identify with the Confederacy and still hold racially conservative views dwarfs the number of White Nationalists by several orders of magnitude.
The only reason David Duke succeeded in Louisiana politics is because he was able to connect with that audience.
It is also a good idea to try to include moderates and respond to their concerns. That shows a level of seriousness that is sorely lacking in some quarters.
If you have written off liberals, conservatives, and moderates, who is left to join the proposed White ethnostate? Why do you even need an ethnostate for such a small constituency?
I liked how Jared Taylor’s essay brought up the for-the-people balanced socialism of his relatives in the traditional South.
Remember how you were once inclined to some socialism for your people, Hunter?
Matt’s running up against the corporatists as you can see on his blog. Robert Lindsay is standing down on communism and claiming to be a socialist now. The latest at AltRight is advising lying to ingratiate with parts of the left, but even in that piece they realize many of the arguments against unrestrained capitalism are correct.
This sick beast of mercantilist worship that Whites, especially American Whites, have defended for too long is exacting its toll by killing your culture and people. Time to stop it with a political program that’s for the people for a change, I think.
PS Remember Joe Bageant. He was pro-White and no one bothered him, no one harassed him for his views, he could speak publicly, travel, everything.
There’s a National-Capitalist option. Capitalism constrained within a “Nation First, Economy Second” box. That might be easier to sell in the US.
There’s a National-Capitalist option. Capitalism constrained within a “Nation First, Economy Second” box. That might be easier to sell in the US.
That makes sense. It forces everyone into two camps and puts the spotlight on those who put an economic system ahead of people and heritage. Are the people only there to serve the economy? Or is the economic system there to serve the people?
I think the vast majority of White people know in their gut the latter option is the only truly moral choice.
Yes, but most drug addicts also know in their gut what is right, but they keep on doing the wrong thing too until they are totally destroyed.
There is the moth and the flame, and there is today the white man and his deadly tropisms.
We are dealing with psychology, not politics and ideologies.
We are dealing with psychology, not politics and ideologies
Hm. I think I see your point to a degree although I’m not clear on why psychology is exclusive of politics and ideologies. They seem connected to me.
I notice the most common ideologies espoused in the past by people who are concerned about White survival are lacking and lead to paralysis and ineffectiveness. I can’t do much more than examine examples of what worked better in some small way. If others can’t see it or don’t agree, I guess that division is the largest part of the problem.
I notice on this site and related ones a great fatigue and yet a great urgency, as if the crash is going to happen tomorrow and it’s over at the same time. Perhaps it is. We are at the turning of a great cycle.
If so, it’s too bad that seeing it all coming does nothing to change it. That is quite a testament to the ultimate weakness of knowledge and intentions in the face of fate.
Lockeford
“Are the people only there to serve the economy? Or is the economic system there to serve the people?”
I think 90% would say the latter. The problem is there are extreme positions on both the economic right and economic left and those positions drive the majority of voters *away* into the two opposing camps. Most of those on the left aren’t there because they were attracted by the socialists they’re there because they were repelled by the capitalists. Most of those on the right aren’t there because they were attracted by the capitalists they’re there because they were repelled by the socialists.
Under normal circumstances that dynamic is very hard to break but nationalists have to as it’s the only way to unite the non-underclass part of the working class vote with the non-corporate part of the middle class vote.
The choice is National Socialism/Anarchism) or National Capitalism. For someone operating in the racial conservative milieu you would have thought the latter would be an easier fit. Buchanan is sort of a National Capitalist.
“We are at the turning of a great cycle.”
I get that feeling.
“If so, it’s too bad that seeing it all coming does nothing to change it.”
I disagree. Whatever happens, the more awake White people are when it happens the better the outcome is likely to be.
“White Southerners have those things, but we have a nation, a people, a culture, a history, an ethnic identity, shared genes and many other things to fall back on and draw strength from.”
White Americans in general have these things. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, White Americans have the single proudest heritage in the world. In the late 19th century, men like Josiah Strong (Our Country) and Theodore Roosevelt (Winning of the West) did an excellent job articulating the emergent nation, people, culture, history, and ethnic identity of America – a nation they clearly saw as rooted in blood and birth, not propositions. (This sense of national identity was widespread at the time, as evidenced in newspaper articles, sermons, popular histories etc.)
If the national awareness of White Americans in our own day is weak compared to the regional awareness of White Southerners, this is because a century of propaganda has been dedicated to annihilating the 19th century concept of “American” (equivalent to early twentieth century “100% American”, “unhyphenated American”, “real American”, Peter Brimelowe’s “historic American nation” or Matt Parrott’s “White American”)
White Southerners have been slandered and stereotyped, but the CONCEPT of “White Southerner” has not been made verbotten, they way the concept of “real American” has been. After 9/11, for example, we were not bombarded with incessant images of Arabs saying “I am, I am, I am a Southerner”
The Culture of Critique had a vital interest in destroying the concept of “real American”, which was the national group awareness of White Americans inheritted from the 19th century. This concept was the driving force behind the 1920s KKK, the 1924 immigration act, and, above all, behind the pressure towards the assimilation of Caucasian immigrants. This concept was, and still is, a threat to the separate existance of the Jews in this country. Thus, the hysterical passion and patient cunning directed against this concept for the past century.
On the other hand, the concept “Southerner”, which was the regional group awareness of White Southerners inherited from the 19th century, was not a existential threat to Jews. Thus, it has survived, not because of any greater inherant strength, but because it was not targeted.
The fate of the concept “American”, the self-awareness of a great people, now faces every national concept in the western world. In Sweden, Arabs and Jews say to the Swedes “I’m just as Swedish as you (but you can never be what I am, a proud Jew/Arab/whatever)”. Unless the concept “Swedish” is actively defended, it will disapear.
Were the South to become independant under the auspices of Jared Taylor’s liberal Southerners and Amren Jews, the hitherto tolerated concept “Southerner” would come under attack. Freshly arrived Arabs and Hasidim, with no real attachments to your homeland – who would never dream of allowing you to date their daughters – would begin telling you “I am just as much a Southerner as you are (but I am what you can never be, a proud Arab/Jew/Gypsie/Turk/whatever)”
All the petty Yankee hating and cowardly anti-anti-Semitism in the world won’t do White Southerners any good. The attack on national self awareness is rooted in a basic difference between the territorial ethnicities of European peoples, and the tribal ethnicities of Middle Eastern peoples. Weakly ethnocentric, exogamous European peoples placed into close geographic proximity merge to form a new people (English, Scotch-Irish, Germans and Hugenouts in the South, for instance, became White Southerners). Hyper ethnocentric, endogamous Middle-Eastern peoples, on the other hand, remain distinct through millenia of close geographic proximity. It is in the interests of Middle Eastern peoples inhabiting European societies to manipulate the ethnic identities of their hosts, so as to enjoy all the benefts of assimilation without actually assimilating. The intellectual defense of this double standard has taken on a life of its own, and is now embraced with gusto by the White liberal elites of the entire western world, including the South. The destruction of this intellectual superstructure is the crucial battle. Otherwise, any seccession movement is like fleeing the Titanic in a leaky lifeboat. The Achilles heal of the Culture of Critique is the current Jewish national myth: always innocent victims, never perpetrators. This myth provides the crucial moral energy of the left. This myth is unraveling – after all, one Jew wrote Esau’s Tears and another produced Defamation. If Judeo-critics do their work right, I think the Culture of Critique will be dead within 50 years. Rational, fact based, non-Nazi, courageous Judeo-criticism is the key to restoring the sanity of both Jews and their White liberal elite acolytes. Once the breach between elite Whites and White commoners is healed, I have no fears for the future of White Americans, or any other White peoples.
Best analysis and advice I have ever read on this website. Excellent.
I don’t hate Yankees at all. Some of my best friends are Yankees.
I also fully agree that there has been a relentless assault on the traditional concept of Americanism. That identity has been so decompiled over the past sixty years that it has begun to lose its appeal to racially conscious Whites.
The argument here is not that Yankees are bad, Southerners are oppressed by the North, or that we should restore the Confederacy. I haven’t said anything here along those lines.
I’ve argued instead that “Whitemanistan” is not a state and that “White people” are not a nation. White Nationalists have little in common except for grievances and abstractions. That is ultimately not enough to launch a nation state.
If we are serious about launching some kind of separatist project, the sensible solution for White Southerners is to fall back on our ethnic and cultural heritage and to try to articulate a more potent sense of Southern ethnic identity (see my remarks about conservatism) that is attractive to the alienated Whites of this generation.
The main argument is that we have a lot more to work with than other White Nationalist groups. The South has fought a war of independence against the United States in which hundreds of thousands died. White Southerners are an ethnic group that have lived in this area for centuries. We have far stronger blood ties than other White Americans.
We have roots here, a distinct culture of our own, a separate regional identity that still resonates with indigenous Whites, a history of racial conflict. The majority of our people identify with their heritage. Millions of White Southerners are explicitly racially conscious.
The South has geographic borders. The “Southern nation” has a name. It has a flag and a national anthem that has universal recognition. We share the same climate, political temperament, and have the same economic interests.
You can make a far stronger argument that Dixie, Quebec, Deseret, and New England are more like France or Ireland than the “Pacific Northwest.” These areas have been settled for centuries.
Again, it is like comparing mountains to molehills. You might have 3,000 people in all of North America who recognize the flag of the “Northwest Republic” and maybe 100 at a maximum who live the Northwest and identify with it. It is an abstract proposal that appeals to alienated intellectuals.
In the South, everyone who lives here recognizes the Confederate flag, and millions of White people identify with it. The White majority of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina overwhelmingly identify with the Confederate flag and that issue has roiled state politics for decades.
Do you see what I am saying?
In one hand, you have a nation that millions of White people already identify with, which has a name, heroes, martyrs, battlefields, borders, blood and deep roots.
In the other, you have a group of alienated anonymous people on the internet, mostly intellectuals who are geographically scattered across a continent, none of whom are related, who spend the majority of their time fighting with each other, with an abstract model for a proposition “ethnostate.”
Those same people actually sit around on the internet, reclined in their computer chairs, trying to concoct “a myth” to unite this heterogeneous mass of alienated people who have nothing in common except their grievances.
We need “a myth” guys, they say. The only reason you would need a myth is because you are not a nation in any real sense of the word. They have an abstract plan, an ideology, some great “ideas” which in an abstract sense they would like to implement in an abstract “community.”
Quebec, for example, doesn’t need a myth. It is a nation with cities that have names.
Quebec, for example, doesn’t need a myth. It is a nation with cities that have names.
Uhm, not really, Hunter. Quebec has a myth of constant persecution, that Quebecers are a single unified bloc, that Canada is denying them independence, and many other common beliefs that aren’t really true. It’s all designed to give them a sense of peoplehood by the Quebec nationalists.
Also, they have a practical political program. Having the right policies and ideology may matter more than many people think (I believe this is true at this time).
Their politics lean strongly towards socialism, which keeps people who are interested in Quebec’s independence a prospective pay-off if they win. In the meantime they can play it both ways, acting persecuted and getting more money from the federal government and even high levels of official representation for their separatists.
It’s not like Anglo/Euro-Canadians crush Quebec uprisings on a regular basis.
There is a lot to learn from Quebec for any nationalist. They’re far more successful than most. Still, they haven’t succeeded at separating despite having referendums on the matter. But they do preserve their culture and heritage to at least a reasonable degree.
The choice is National Socialism/Anarchism) or National Capitalism. For someone operating in the racial conservative milieu you would have thought the latter would be an easier fit. Buchanan is sort of a National Capitalist.
When watching from Canada, it seems that Buchanan represented some terrific ideas and traditions. Beyond it just being the powers-that-be crushing opposition, I would have expected a great deal of popular support for what he stood for.
Maybe the National Capitalist option isn’t actually a better fit after all. I prefer it in some ways because it created more intergenerational mobility, higher wages, and local wealth creation; however the socialist option is increasingly appealing for reasons I won’t bother citing here due to the new Southern conservative focus of this site.
I do agree most people go socialist due to disgust with the capitalists. Certainly that is what is happening to me slowly but surely. I’ve totally lost patience with the neocon and big business manipulations.
I haven’t got the impression that Quebec really wants to secede from Canada. Didn’t they have a vote on that years ago?
The Quebecois easily have a strongest national identity of any of the North American “sub-nations,” but the new multicultural arrangement they have in Canada suits their interests and keeps them in the Canadian Union. I would say it is inarguable that the Quebecois are a distinct people.
Southern ethnonationalists have always been interested in the Quebec example for pretty obvious reasons. The Louisiana Cajuns were assimilated into Anglo-America whereas the Quebecois preserved their separate ethnic identity.
The reason that free market capitalism is so popular in Dixie is that the region is still recovering from a hundred years of economic underdevelopment which was directly caused by our defeat in the War Between the States.
In the Antebellum period, Southerners were strongly critical of free market capitalism which was identified with Yankee materialism and exploitation of a European cheap labor workforce.
In the 1930s, Southerners were FDR supporters and supported everything that is now decried as “socialism” and “big government.” As late as the 1960s, Southerners were voting for LBJ who was a New Deal liberal.
Southerners have no objection to “big government” and “wealth redistribution” when it comes to military spending or subsidized agriculture. We have been through several different economic philosophies over the course of American history.
As proof that Southerners can beat Yankees at their own game, look no further than Wal-Mart and Coca Cola.
Lockeford
“Maybe the National Capitalist option isn’t actually a better fit after all.”
It’s hard to say, especially as the current economic woes are likely to shake people’s convictions but the word “socialism” gets a mostly negative reaction some places while the word “capitalism” gets the majority negative reaction elsewhere so people need to know their own audience. Whichever word fits the bulk of the audience it can be softened by adding another word to it e.g Nationalist Capitalism or Populist Capitalism or something.
China’s economic policy could be described as Nationalist Capitalist for example (or even National Socialist as i think in reality if the National bit takes precedence they end up being more or less the same thing).
Sticking with the theme of using pre-existing local traditions there’s the Southern Agrarians from the 30s as well who i think were about finding a compromise that would appeal to the middle 2/3 of the population, possibly even 3/4.
I haven’t got the impression that Quebec really wants to secede from Canada. Didn’t they have a vote on that years ago?
Yup, and they didn’t get quite enough votes. Their politicians like to play it both ways, claim separation is better for them and how hard done they are by Confederation, and then get the benefits of the Anglo establishment which is spooked by the prospect of losing them. I think it’s a bit like Blacks shaking down Whites in the US, but the Quebecois offer just a tad more value for the dough.
I would say it is inarguable that the Quebecois are a distinct people.
I agree. I only wish that the Anglo side of Canada maintained our traditions similarly. The Anglo tendency to essentially blank out our race and culture is disturbing. In many ways the Quebecois are one of the best examples of a nationalist movement.
At some point I’d like the real story on why Pat Buchanan didn’t get a lot more votes. What were his main weaknesses? Or was it just the establishment powers somehow thwarting him? He seemed to have pretty close to ideal policies. I would have thought they would have had huge appeal.
I was rooting for him back when he was running. He seems like a really solid and well meaning guy, too.
it seems to me from the books i read that from the 1820s-1860s we were just as much another nation as today, the words recorded from the past live on even if they aint taught in schools, the picture i seen written of the Old Antebellum South of them times is nigh on mythical to think bout today, everybody smokin cigars, tobacco chew, spit, and king cotton reigned supreme, back when WE were the masters of our destiny, i guess it mighta intensified after the war, and them confederate white knights in shinin armor of them times
y’know i remember seein a documentary of FDR shakin the hands of confederate veterans in 1938
my good Lord it seemed like i was seein ghosts from the past, legends from another time,
long white beards halfway down heir chests, a fierce, proud light behind their eyes
how the world changed in their day, from the forged iron plow, to the railroad system to the war of northern aggression to the indian wars, to the cartridge rifle/revolver to the bolt action to the boll weevil epidemic, the fall of king cotton, to the yankee carpetbaggers and the union occupation, the “reconstruction” (deconstruction), the electric light, the telephone, hell the dang telegraph, the end of the sailing ship and the rise of the ironclad, the fall of that and the rise of the battleship, then the aircraft carrier even
the crash of the 1890s, WWI, pancho villa and the mexicans, the roaring twenties, the depression, the haiti war, all them banana corporation fights,
radio, television, the automobile, the nuclear bomb too
now i’m 20 years old and i find the internet a big step, all these fancypants cellphones and whatnot too, just think of all the changes in their day 1840-1950 (for the oldest)
the world was unrecognizeable, from smoothbore muskets and completely rural southern life to the downfall of the war and back again
‘We dislike everything from miscegenation to immigration to urban sprawl
to communism because it violates that sense of place in a fundamental
way. You don’t have a gut reaction to Heidi Klum and Seal making out
because you have read the Bell Curve.’
Great pithy comment.