Red Phillips has written an article in response to the debate over republicanism we are having on this website, and which has come up many times before on Facebook, which he connects to some recent changes in the League of the South.
In this article, he presents the Southern Nationalist camp as being divided into roughly three factions:
(1) Paleocons who, on the vital question of what the US Constitution really meant, believe that the Constitution wasn’t a radically centralizing document. Like most of the original Southern Nationalists, these people believe that Lincoln subverted the US Constitution and the original American Republic, but they may or may not support contemporary secession from the United States.
(2) Paleocons who, on the vital question of what the US Constitution really meant, believe the Constitution was a radically centralizing document, but who believe the Union was always terrible bargain for the South, and who support contemporary secession from the United States for various reasons.
(3) The “new guard” of anti-republicans who reject Americanism root-and-branch and want to secede for contemporary reasons.
There’s also the “heritage movement” which is centered on the SCV and various flagger groups. This faction is focused exclusively on defending Confederate memory and generally eschews interest in contemporary issues. The vast majority of these people are Rainbow Confederates who oppose modern day secession. They are not Southern Nationalists, but there is so much overlap in these circles that including them in the broader “Southern movement” is warranted here.
Insofar as the League of the South goes, there’s a broad spectrum of views within the organization, but the imperative of seceding from the present day United States is the common ground that unites us. There’s a consensus that “anything is better than this” and other points of contention can be sorted out after secession. We’re also united on the point of opposing the demographic displacement of White Southerners.
In any case, secession isn’t what is being debated here. Instead, it is the rise of the “new guard” and our ideas within the League. It’s true that there are anti-republicans within the League. Since I am closely associated with this faction, I will act as our spokesman and lay out our point of view on several key areas of disagreement:
1.) The US Constitution – Why are we even debating this at a time when the US Supreme Court is preparing to legalize “gay marriage”?
Shouldn’t it be obvious by now that the US Constitution was a failure? If we grant that it was a failure, why should we revere it? Why should such a failure, which has guided us toward this disaster, be our model for moving forward?
Does it matter at this far gone point what the US Constitution “really meant”? If it has been an abject failure in sustaining a culturally conservative society in practice, it was clearly flawed. What’s more, examining those flaws and taking measures to correct them should be our starting point for creating our next government.
2.) The Articles of Confederation – This scheme of government lasted for all of six years – please note this website is now older than the Articles of Confederation – before it was scrapped by the Founders themselves. Why should a form of government that was so unstable and so quickly undermined by speculators inspire confidence as a model for creating a new government?
3.) The Confederacy – Like the Articles of Confederation, the Confederacy lasted all of four years, which was due in large part to its own instability. The Confederacy was an attempt to create a slave-based republic. Otherwise, the Confederate Constitution was a close copy of the US Constitution with only a few minor changes.
The Confederacy lost the war because the South was polarized and divided over slavery. Large swathes of the Upper South were anti-Confederate, indifferent to the Confederate cause, or fought for the Union. But why insist on dredging this up now? Slavery is a moot issue. No one in the Southern Nationalist movement wants to restore slavery. Labeling ourselves “Confederates” or “Neo-Confederates” only accomplishes one thing … linking our cause to a dead republic, which no one can ever bring back, that was fought over a moot issue that no one cares about anymore.
4.) The “Old Republic” – There are a lot of paleocons who romanticize the “Old Republic” that was destroyed by Abraham Lincoln.
Should this “Old Republic” be our model for moving forward with our next government? It’s worth noting here that this “Old Republic” lasted for all of three generations – roughly 70 years – before it too collapsed under its own weight. It died on the battlefield where the winning side was fighting for a “new nation” which was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Now, the argument will be made by paleocons here that it was Lincoln who subverted the “Old Republic,” but they can’t ignore the fact that the winning side in that war, which represented the majority of White Americans, was the one that fought for abolitionism and an egalitarian proposition nation, and which spent the next twelve years after the war trying to “reconstruct” the South along those lines.
Is this not disturbing? Is this not thought provoking?
5.) Republicanism – This is the core issue that divides the anti-republican camp from the paleocons: upon close reflection, anti-republicans have serious doubts about the stability of the republican form of government, and would prefer a different form of government altogether as a model for moving forward.
The “Old Republic,” which is revered by paleocons, was destroyed by Americans who were convinced that the United States wasn’t republican enough, which is to say, it wasn’t free enough or equal enough. The whole course of American history has followed the leveling trajectory unleashed by the American Revolution. There’s no room for any debate within the “mainstream” in the United States outside of the boundaries of liberalism with its two poles of “freedom” and “equality.” According to Americanism, nothing else in life is good except more freedom or more equality.
Paleocons deny that America is a product of the same Enlightenment liberalism which convulsed all of Europe in the Age of Revolution. In order to do this, they have to deny that America’s philosophical foundations are rooted in classical liberalism – in John Locke, Montesquieu, and the British Radical Whig tradition:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence lays out the most famous statement of “rights talk” classical liberalism in the world: the notion that the sole purpose of government is to secure the individual rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The government here is just a social contract, a grand bargain, between individuals with equal rights that can be abolished whenever the principles of liberalism are felt to be violated.
Paleocons strangely deny that the American Revolution was an ideological war while turning a blind eye to how the legacy of the American Revolution, the toxic ideology of Americanism, was invoked by each and every single successful leveling movement that followed in its wake, whether it was Jeffersonianism that leveled the “Old Republic” into a full blown democracy (while the ink was barely dry on the US Constitution), or the abolition, free love, and women’s suffrage movements which drew their strength from the radical legacy of the American Revolution, or the Civil Rights Movement, which first became an issue after the war, or contemporary feminism and women’s rights and the ongoing struggle for homosexual liberation.
Maybe Yankees are to blame for all of this though and separating from them would have sufficed to check this downward spiral into the dark pit of “social justice”? That’s a comforting thought, but it fails to take into account that republican extremism, and the historical absence of a culture that blossomed in the bosom of slavery, is the reason why Yankees are like that in the first place. Without the practical reality of having to manage millions of negroes in their midst, Yankees set out about following the destructive abstract principles of Americanism to their ultimate radical conclusion.
The French took republicanism to even greater extremes during the French Revolution where the same conflict that played out in the United States between the South and the North over slavery, white supremacy, and “rights talk” was replicated in the conflict between Saint-Domingue and metropolitan France. The course of republicanism in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Ireland and other Western countries should raise even graver doubts about the stability of the republican form of government.
The bottom line here is that it is hard to look around the modern world and see much hope for a stable, conservative society in the numerous examples of countries that have adopted the republican form of government. Wherever we look (Lincoln’s America, Jacobin France, and Weimar Germany being only three of the worst examples), we see nothing but a landscape of social decline in the West after countless elections.
6.) The Confederate Battle Flag – See the Confederacy.
See also the “New Confederate Army” and CSA.Gov. We have no objection to 1.) defending Confederate memory or 2.) honoring our ancestors. At the same time, we fail to see the point of living in the past and getting bogged down in debates over moot issues when our very future existence as a people is now under threat. Also, it doesn’t help matters that the last two generations have spent so much time trashing the aesthetic of the CBF and ghettoizing its appeal into a symbol of a degraded subculture:
7.) Focusing on the Present – We believe that our cause, which is a fight to secure the future existence of our people, dwarfs the cause of the Confederacy in its importance. Existence matters far more than independence. Our existence is under threat and nothing else remotely comes close in our priorities.
8.) Ethnonationalism – Ethnonationalism emerged during the 19th century Romantic movement in reaction to the 18th century civic nationalism of the French Republic. The US was founded on the older concept of civic nationalism, which is to say, the ideal of the union of free men against tyrants. The American Founders rejected their English heritage and Anglophobia dominated the US until the twentieth century when the rise of Germany forced an Anglo-American rapprochement.
9.) The Proposition Nation – From the very beginning of American history, Americans thought of their country as some kind of shining beacon of republican freedom, a “City on a Hill,” that other European countries were supposed to emulate, or else.
To say that America wasn’t driven by ideological fervor requires ignoring inconvenient facts like how Jefferson cheered on the French Revolution, or how Americans glorified European revolutionaries like Kossuth and Garibaldi, or how the US clashed with the Holy Alliance, which represented the old order, or supported the spread of republicanism in Latin America, which culminated in an intervention in Cuba.
America as an ethnonationalist republic makes even less sense considering how Britain was America’s primary antagonist in the 19th century. The fact is, Americans have always wanted to spread their cherished “institutions” overseas – and here too, remember, because the Yankees came here to teach us the true meaning of “freedom” and “equality” after the war. The postwar South was not up to their “republican” standard.
10.) True Southern Nationalism – For some reason, Red has convinced himself that only republicans can be Southern Nationalists. It’s as if the history of the South begins in 1776 and is synonymous with the United States. Nothing else that happened before that date counts on the republican calender.
In reality, the formative years of Southern culture were in the colonial era when slavery and the plantation system were introduced. The South already had a distinct culture before the American Revolution. What made the South distinct from the Northeastern colonies is due to the legacy of that time period, not to republicanism, which was adopted by both sections of the United States. The primary difference was that the Southern colonies were slave societies which led to the same sort of cultural conservatism found in the British and French West Indies which also proved resistant to the excesses of republican ideological fervor.
By the 1850s, George Fitzhugh and other Southern antebellum writers had become severely critical of the suffocating influence of Jefferson’s republicanism.
Conclusion
America has now evolved into its final form as a cultural and political dung heap of liberty and equality – just like every other republican experiment in the modern West. No one has any reason to believe that rolling the dice again on republicanism will produce a result any different from what we can see on display right now.
Those who are alienated and miserable underneath the results of republicanism (we won’t get into the Jew issue here, which is a can of worms republicanism made possible) would like to consider our options before making a leap of a faith on the basis of a romanticized fancy. Conservatives who revere the past believe they can vote their way to an America, one that has never existed, which is not embroiled in a perpetual state of social revolution. Good luck with that!
Note: For the record, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Waffle House have nothing to do with this debate.
OK, I’ll ask it this way:
If George III really was inciting the Indians, would the colonists have been morally justified in rebelling against British rule?
What’s your objection to Jews?
As American citizens, are the Jews not supposed to have equal rights? Shouldn’t they be treated as individuals, not as members of a collective group? Shouldn’t their inviolable property rights be respected? And shouldn’t religious tolerance apply to them?
The constitution did not give equal rights to Jews. The constitution prevented the federal government from instituting a national church. It was not until after the 14th ammendment that the bill of rights were thought to limit what state governments could do. And many states in early America had religious tests for holding political office (that is, you had to affirm to be a Christian). Jews were thus banned from fully participating in politics, and were not seen as fully enfranchized citizens of these states.
I mentioned England’s experiment with republicanism under Cromwell above. New England at that time was really just a small offshoot of that.
So it isn’t fair to say that American republicanism is a pure product of the Enlightenment, given that there were puritan republics in existence in America in the 1640s, and that some of these colonies kept their original colonial constitutions when they joined the United States?
There’s a difference between, say, “liberality” understood as a classical virtue and “freedom” in the modern sense of the word as a universal “right” or abstract principle. The latter is treated as if it were the social science equivalent of a physical law.
But you do agree that all of the rights and liberties I mentioned should be provided for in a white society?
I’d ask you what your objection is to using a theory of rights when establishing a government, but you are unwilling or unable to explain your own theory of the origin of rights.
Regarding what the founders actually thought about preconditions for successful republics:
Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who, that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?
-George Washington
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
-Benjamin Franklin
We have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-John Adams
If the British government was clearly trying to destroy its own colonists, then yes. That wasn’t the case at all though in the American Revolution. It was a rebellion over the “tyranny” of a few trivial taxes which were passed to defray the costs of the global war that Britain had fought against France to secure America’s borders. Americans were the primary benefactors of that war, so it was felt should help shoulder the costs.
Just out of curiosity, what happened to the established state churches in the United States? Anglicanism was disestablished in South Carolina (1790), Virginia (1786), Georgia (1789), and Maryland (1776). The Congregationalist Church fell in Massachusetts (1780) and Connecticut (1818). In other colonies, the established state churches ceased to exist at the time of the American Revolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States#ref_Disestablishment
So what you are saying here is that Christianity has ebbed under American republicanism as secularism and religious tolerance has grown over time?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_United_States#Colonial_era
“There were only about 12 Jews living in North America in the 17th century. These faced a number of restrictions, including being banned from practicing law, medicine, art, and other professions. As late as 1790, one year before adoption of the Bill of Rights, several states had religious tests for holding public office, and Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and South Carolina still maintained established churches. Within a few years of the ratification of the Constitution, Delaware, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia eliminated barriers that prevented Jews from voting, but these barriers did not fall for many decades in Rhode Island (1842), North Carolina (1868), and New Hampshire (1877). Despite these restrictions, which were often enforced unevenly, there were really too few Jews in 17th- and 18th-century America for antisemitism to become a significant social or political phenomenon at the time (although antisemitism as a phenomenon does not depend on the presence of Jews). And the evolution from toleration to full civil and political equality for Jews that followed the American Revolution helped ensure that antisemitism would never become official government policy, as it had in Europe.
How have the Jews fared under republican governments in Europe? Naturally, it was the French Republic that first emancipated the Jews in France, and it was Napoleon’s armies that spread Jewish emancipation across continental Europe. Tellingly, this was reversed in some parts of Germany after the Congress of Vienna, only to restored again after the liberal Revolutions of 1848:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_emancipation
“Jewish emancipation, implemented under Napoleonic rule in French occupied and annexed states, suffered a setback in many member states of the German Confederation following the decisions of the Congress of Vienna … During the Revolutions of 1848, Jewish emancipation was granted by the Basic Rights of the Frankfurt Parliament (Paragraph 13), which said that civil rights were not to be conditional on religious faith. But only some German states introduced the Frankfurt parliamentary decision as state law, such as Hamburg; other states were reluctant. Important German states, such as Prussia (1812), Württemberg (1828), Electorate of Hesse (1833), and Hanover (1842), had already emancipated their Jews as citizens.”
Jew flocked to the Dutch Republic during the “Golden Age” of the Netherlands where they enjoyed unparalled acceptance:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/netherlands.html
In other ways, however, the Netherlands’ Jewish community was atypical. While in general, European Jews isolated themselves economically and socially as well as politically, the Jews of the Netherlands enjoyed, as early as the seventeenth century, economic and social integration that the rest of European Jewry would not know for hundreds of years.
See the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher.[2] The breadth and importance of Spinoza’s work was not fully realized until many years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment[3] and modern biblical criticism,[4] including modern conceptions of the self and, arguably, the universe,[5] he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy.[6]
What did George Washington have to say about the Jews?
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/bigotry.html
“Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens. …
May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
In light of how the American experiment with “rights and liberties” turned out (see also all the other experiments in liberal republicanism in the West) we are in favor of pausing to consider our options and rethink this before jumping on board with republicanism again out of blind conservatism and nostalgia.
Seeing as how today is the Martin Luther King, Jr. federal holiday, my objection is obviously that there are no limits to rights talk and nothing to prevent rights talk from being turned against White societies, as it was during Civil Rights Movement, and used as a battering ram of abstractions to tear down our racial and cultural integrity. Do women have the right to abort their own children? Do homosexuals have the right to marry someone of the same sex?
James Madison responds to his critics in The Federalist and explains here how his constitutional machinery can counteract the impulses of a vicious population:
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm
“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. …”
Hunter: King George was just the scapegoat. By that time, Parliament had subsumed most of the powers, thanks to the “Glorious Revolution”. Almost everything Jefferson listed in the Declaration, to today’s situation, seem petty and whiny.
Hunter: I’m afraid the Constitution was a deception from the very beginning. The Anti-Federalists had it nailed–it was designed to form an all powerful central government and annihilate the sovereignty of the States. It has done just that. You said it well a few years ago–the Constitution has become nothing but a magic relic used to sanctify the next progressive, imaginary “right”.
There is no such thing as a natural right.
There is not such thing as a human right.
There is such a thing as rights that come as a member of society, and they are always balanced by equal and opposite duties.
The problem with “progressive” republics is that they eventually sell out the fatherland–that is the stock who put them together for them and their Posterity.
Man’s natural state is in society, he was never alone. Contrary to the Enlightenment crowd, they didn’t just get together one day and use their reason to make up the perfect society. It evolved along with him.
The spread of liberal republican institutions, with its doctrines of religious tolerance and universal equal rights, and the rise of Jewish influence in the West are part of the same trend. Is it a coincidence that so many Jews flocked to the United States?
The USA was completely an Enlightenment construct. Also, the overdose of “individual” over “society” comes from this line of thinking. Blank slate bunk too.
So much of the modern West is guided by this outdated philosophy, whose theorists never had the illumination of Darwin, and never understood genetics. They based their ideas on God creating man and dropping him in the Garden of Eden, in other words, Hebrew Mythology.
Jews are simply taking advantage of a situation the Enlightenment caused. In the long run, the West will come to understand that their old nobility was the only protection they truly had from foreign influence.
Enlightenment ideas can work, but they cannot be universalized. Once they are put to work outside the true nation (one people by blood and heritage and language and custom), they bring ruin.
@ Brad:
“What’s your objection to Jews?
As American citizens, are the Jews not supposed to have equal rights? Shouldn’t they be treated as individuals, not as members of a collective group? Shouldn’t their inviolable property rights be respected? And shouldn’t religious tolerance apply to them?”
Were these rhetorical questions, Brad, or did you ask them sincerely?
White southerners seem to want to secede from the US, while white americans in other areas of the country want to secede from the state government that tethers them to liberal big cities. But it doesn’t seem like the southerners are rushing to go back to a system which relegated them to pale slaves. Slavery always decimates the middle class. It’s just basic economics.
Hunter—The University of Pennsylvania, of all places, published a history of anti-Semitism in early America. The cartoons in it were a hoot.
So PP, you want to start by limiting the franchise. Hmmm… where have I heard that idea before? … thinking … thinking … Oh yeah, I remember now. That would be the US in 1789. Authentic conservative have always supported limiting the franchise. As well, the US limited what was directly elected by the people to half of one branch of the fed gov.
Hunter (and PP), I believe you are conflating liberalism with republicanism. Much of what you describe is the working out of liberalism, not republicanism. Liberalism is an idea or a theory. Republicanism is a technical strategy. There is no reason you can’t have an illiberal republic unless you define liberalism as anything that is not monarchy.
What we have today is a plutocracy/oligarchy. But what if we had sound money, no central bank, a central gov that had a very limited power to tax or regulate, and had a very strictly limited list of things it was authorized to do? (Making sticking to this list enforceable would be one way we would need to improve on the Constitution.) The plutocrats and the oligarchs wouldn’t even want it. What could they do with it? In fact, it is highly predictable that they would shift their focus to the states and see if they couldn’t find a foothold in some of them.
What if we only had a standing army in time of war or imminent threat? There would be no military industrial complex. There goes a huge part of your plutocrat/oligarch contingent right there.
Re: Red
If you are trying to say that the American and French Republics were nothing like the Roman Republic, I would agree. The US and France are examples of modern liberal republicanism (universal equal rights, rights bearing individualists, proposition nations formed by compacts), not classical republicanism. Unlike Rome, liberalism was woven into their DNA from the beginning.
HW: “The primary difference was that the Southern colonies were slave societies which led to the same sort of cultural conservatism found in the British and French West Indies which also proved resistant to the excesses of republican ideological fervor.”
If you would rather not bring back slavery, you can imitate the Amish. You don’t need to go full Amish, but I think what’s needed is a smaller scale society, with a lot of economic protectionism.
“Paleocons deny that America is a product of the same Enlightenment liberalism which convulsed all of Europe in the Age of Revolution.”
The decadence of civilization is not just the result of ideology. It has a lot to do with the industrialization and political centralization, and with the fact that life has become easier.
Agree with Red. Throwing out a well-designed republic on the basis of an advanced, chronic infection of liberalism is not entirely sensible. It all comes back to the fact that culture defines the form and spirit of the institutions, and if it weren’t for the alien influences on our media, education, finance, and government. People truly get a government that represents them, as the founders (who seem to have gone out of fashion here) recognized. The republic functioned well, and would still work well if proper checks on usurpation by foreigners were implemented (checks on lobbies and campaign contributions, constitutionally mandated demographic policies). We would be fine if we were able to maintain/reinforce our ideas within our own cultural context, but our institutions and media or not under our control/ownership.
I don’t care for fascism or authoritarianism of any kind, but the following represent what has happened to us:
The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread.
Liberalism is a disease of the mind that weakens man to a state of dependence.
-Adolf Hitler
TJ,
Any comment on how it was the triumph of republicanism in Europe and America that brought down all the traditional barriers that had been set up to Jewish influence? Shouldn’t we expect Jews to climb the social scale when embraced in the name of tolerance and granted the unfettered freedom to do so? Treating Jews as rights bearing individualists with inviolable freedoms and property rights seems to me like a recipe for a Jewish takeover.
Finally, I have a question of my own: where in the world is there an example of a people living under the republican form of government, or where parliamentary institutions are dominant, that have voted their way to a stable, conservative society, which is not plagued by a perpetual state of social revolution and ideological leveling?
Every major Western political theorist from Aristotle to James Burnham believed that democracy turned into demagoguery and then ended up as dictatorship. Of course, there is a distinction between democracy and republicanism, one which the American Founding Fathers understood–though over the ensuing centuries was lost owing to factors listed in HW’s article.
It might be argued that a republican form of government would be viable if it were part of a racially homogenous ethno-state. i.e., no permanently aggrieved minorities, no colonial populations simmering in rebellion, certainly no slaves.
The USA was a white man’s country up until the mid-20th century. Certainly there is correlation with republicanism. But in the long run, a mixed race country becomes a battleground in which one ethnicity exerts tyranny over the others, or self-destructs into warring parties.
This is a topic which needs further discussion since it is vital for the formation of a new white polity.
Here’s the Marine Le Pen Op-ed in the NY Times on how Muslims need to be assimilated and integrated into France’s secular culture for the sake of preserving its republican values:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/opinion/marine-le-pen-france-was-attacked-by-islamic-fundamentalism.html
Re: R_Moreland
You’re right. The American Republic established by the Founders had declined into a mass democracy within the span of two generations. All it took was twenty or thirty years. It happened so quickly that the argument that “America is a republic, not a democracy” falls flat. It had become a democracy before Jefferson and Adams were in their graves!
I submit Israel as an example of a highly effective republic that includes both federal and democratic structures and still serves the interests of its people very well. Republics work fine when you have a fairly cohesive people, a strong culture, effective limitations on alien minorities and, especially, an elite that identifies very strongly with those they rule.
The basic structure of the Israeli government could have come from Montesquieu.
The charge that King George III was inciting the Indians on the frontier was the most ridiculous charge in the Declaration for two reasons.
1.) The colonists were inciting the Indians by violating treaties and illegally encroaching upon their territory. This was a process that would continue until the late 19th century with many stops along the way such as when Georgia ignored the Supreme Court and seized lands from the Cherokee.
2.) Britain fought a world war to evict the French from North America and the Proclamation of 1763 was intended to restore order to the frontier by curbing the activities of land speculators.
This comment deserves closer analysis.
Are you saying that this charge against the monarch is false because you have actually studied what the king was up to at this time, or are you saying that it is false because it doesn’t fit with your notion of what he would likely do? It seems to be the latter, and this is hardly a responsible way to investigate history.
As it turns out, King George actually did enlist the aid of red savages in his efforts against the white colonists.
The following is from the wikipedia entry on the Indian chief Joseph Brant:
On November 11, 1775, Guy Johnson took Brant with him to London to solicit more support from the government. Brant hoped to persuade the Crown to address past Mohawk land grievances in exchange for their participation as allies in the impending war. The British government promised the Iroquois people land in Quebec if the Iroquois nations would fight on the British side in what was shaping up as open rebellion by the American colonists. In London, Brant was treated as a celebrity and was interviewed for publication by James Boswell. He was received by King George III at St. James’s Palace. While in public, he dressed in traditional Mohawk attire. He was accepted as a Mason and received his ritual apron personally from King George.
Note that this occurred in 1775, the year before the declaration was written. Do you still stand by your earlier claim that the signers of the Declaration were lying when they affirmed that King George was encouraging Indian tribes to prepare for war against the colonists?
(I especially love the part about King George making the Indian chief a mason. So much for the “America is a masonic plot” theory.)
Initially the colonists saw their dispute with the Crown and parliament as an internal affair between Englishmen. The colonists were deeply offended when the British enlisted the aid of red savages. They were also deeply offended by the British use of German mercenaries against their own ethnic kinsmen.
You also mention that the British had spent much blood and treasure driving back the French in North America. This is true, but the British quickly turned around and used the French Canadians against the colonists when they thought it to be to their advantage. Hence the Quebec Act, one of the “Intolerable Acts” that finally brought about the revolution. The Quebec Act granted to the French Canadians lands that had been part of original colonial charters. Once again, the British showed their willingness to favor ethnic and cultural aliens over the colonists.
Perhaps you aren’t familiar enough with the events surrounding the revolution to be able to declare what its true causes were?
Seeing as how today is the Martin Luther King, Jr. federal holiday, my objection is obviously that there are no limits to rights talk and nothing to prevent rights talk from being turned against White societies, as it was during Civil Rights Movement, and used as a battering ram of abstractions to tear down our racial and cultural integrity. Do women have the right to abort their own children? Do homosexuals have the right to marry someone of the same sex?
You seem rather confused about the nature of rights. All political systems, whether republican, feudal, monarchical, etc., are based on rights. To have a political theory is to have a theory of rights (although apparently you don’t claim to have a theory on either). If any talk of rights inevitably leads to the right to infanticide and sodomy, then we can’t discuss politics at all.
James Madison responds to his critics in The Federalist and explains here how his constitutional machinery can counteract the impulses of a vicious population:
I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove by this quote. Where does Madison say that his constitution would function well in a heathen multi-racial society?
And while I grant you that there are differences between the founding fathers and the Classical political theorists, the differences are not nearly as great as you suggest.
From Cicero, the greatest defender of the Roman republic:
the principle which constitutes the bond of human society and of a virtual community of life has the widest scope. Of this there are two divisions, — justice, in which consists the greatest lustre of virtue, and which those who possess are termed good; and in close alliance with justice, beneficence, which may also be called benignity or liberality. The first demand of justice is, that no one do harm to another, unless provoked by injury; the next, that one use common possessions as common, private, as belonging to their owners. Private possessions, indeed, are not so by nature, but by ancient occupancy, as in the case of settlers in a previously uninhabited region; or by conquest, as in the territory acquired in war; or by law, treaty, agreement, or lot…Thus it comes to pass that the territory of Arpinas is said to belong to the Arpinates, that of Tusculum to the Tuscans, and a similar account is to be given of the possessions of individual owners. Because each person thus has for his own a portion of those things which were common by nature, let each hold undisturbed what has fallen to his possession. If any one endeavors to obtain more for himself, he will violate the law of human society. But since, as it has been well said by Plato, we are not born for ourselves alone; since our country claims a part in us, our parents a part, our friends a part; and since, according to the Stoics, whatever the earth bears is created for the use of men, while men were brought into being for the sake of men, that they might do good to one another, — in this matter we ought to follow nature as a guide, to contribute our part to the common good, and by the interchange of kind offices, both in giving and receiving, alike by skill, by labor, and by the resources at our command, to strengthen the social union of men among men. But the foundation of justice is good faith, that is, steadfastness and truth in promises and agreements.
While Cicero may not have thought of moral laws as Newtonian, he certainly shared the Platonic concept of moral laws having an objective, eternal existence.
Is Cicero here propounding a theory of pure blood and soil nationalism, or is he explaining the nature of society by reference to immutable moral laws that apply to all men?
@HW
I would argue that the same would have happened under any other system of government. The root of the problem was the presence of an antagonistic, deceptive, and highly-organized foreign demographic. They should have been expelled from Europe and never allowed to enter the United States. Secondly, there were mechanisms allowing them to enter positions of political power. This doesn’t account for their ability to obtain and exploit positions of cultural authority, which I argue has been far more instrumental in molding and diversifying society.
Jews had been banned from the UK under a system of Monarchy (King Edward I, in 1290), only to be permitted back in by a later King at the behest of Oliver Cromwell. This act of treason was around the time of the glorious revolution ca. 1680, and it’s hard to doubt he was paid handsomely for it.
They invented the Ellis Island myth, and the myth of the Melting Pot and the Salad Bowl. They were quick to build up monopolies and board room access in corporations representing the press, then film, and then television industries. They never self-identified as Jews while promoting these myths and have thrived on the ignorance of their hosts.
This can all be traced to the fact that none of these demographic issues were addressed or treated as fundamental to the system. A significant section of the population considered them culturally fundamental as a matter of identity, but the sentiments were unable to be permanently codified. These thoughts were expressed vividly and in great deal yet were never explicitly enumerated. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1790 should have been a core and immutable part of the founding documents.
Part of the problem stemmed from ignorance and scientific immaturity regarding the subject of race and ethnicity. DNA was not discovered until the 1950’s and only testable and mainstream within the last 20-30 years. The other factor which hasn’t been accounted for is flight and mass transit which were not even conceivable at the time. In 1776, mass immigration was basically a non-issue and thus not addressed.
Demographics must be defined explicitly within the government charter, because today’s conditions allow for massive population exchange. This is pertinent even (perhaps especially) to a liberty oriented minimalist government.
What is important is having some form of social contract equating to a consensus of what defines the in-group and what measures are available to the in-group to identify and evict racial deviants. Government isn’t even necessary then and becomes a matter of aesthetics.
HW: “The primary difference was that the Southern colonies were slave societies which led to the same sort of cultural conservatism found in the British and French West Indies which also proved resistant to the excesses of republican ideological fervor.”
In France, as in Russia, the revolution was made possible by political centralism. Most people were peasants, with conservative ideas. Most of them opposed the new regime. Before the French Revolution, the political power was entirely concentrated in Paris. The government was becoming less and less authoritarian. Many young Parisians had too much money and too much time on their hands. Many of them were jurists who knew how political institutions work. They were interested in political abstractions. Some of them took part in philosophical societies where they probably prepared the revolution.
In the end, the country’s predominant culture didn’t matter. What made the French revolution possible was the sub-culture of a small minority. In Russia, they didn’t have slavery, but the condition of the peasants was probably not better. It must have been a very conservative society. But it didn’t prevent Lenin from seizing power.
“The US and France are examples of modern liberal republicanism (universal equal rights, rights bearing individualists, proposition nations formed by compacts)”
Actually, the US and France are examples of Jewish soft dictatorships enforcing soft genocide on White people.
An example of universal equal rights”: if you are a Pygmy fresh out of the Congolese forest, you are entitled to a free apartment in New York or Paris, paid for with White people’s money.
Stop pretending it has anything to do with republican ideals.
It is a Jewish genocidal joke.
Re: Armor
What’s really a joke is pretending that Jewish power and influence in the United States and France has nothing to do with the spread of republicanism. In France, Jews were emancipated by the French Revolution after centuries of marginalization. It was the republican ideas of the Revolution – religious tolerance, militant secularism, radical individualism, equal rights under the law, and unfettered freedom – which made their rise possible.
Take the Netherlands for example – the first experiment in republicanism in modern Western Europe. It was no coincidence that the Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, became a gathering point for Jews after their expulsion from Spain. Jews flocked to the Netherlands because they knew they had it better there than anywhere else in Europe. In the Dutch Republic, Jews could rise in the social scale and become influential philosophers like Spinoza, which was a taste of what was to come. In the Western hemisphere, Jews flocked to all the Dutch colonies – to Brazil when it was briefly under Dutch rule, then Suriname and Curaçao, to St. Eustatius in the Caribbean, and especially to New York when it was New Amsterdam.
As for the United States, the American Revolution removed what few barriers there had been to Jewish power and influence in the colonies, or laid the foundation or challenging those barriers on the basis of the Revolution’s sacred theory of universal equal rights. Republicanism gave the Jews a free hand to operate under the First Amendment. The Constitution made Jewish property rights inviolable. It made their individual rights sacrosanct. The republican political culture of the United States, which sees Jews through the lens of universalism, individualism, and egalitarianism, is the reason why anti-Semitism has never gained traction here.
Why wouldn’t Jews own huge media conglomerates? Why wouldn’t Jews own Hollywood studios? Why wouldn’t Jews be making fortunes on Wall Street? Why wouldn’t Jews be so dominant in the humanities departments of Ivy League universities? Why wouldn’t Jewish oligarchs like Soros be corrupting our political system? Because of republicanism, the welcome mat was thrown at the door, and they were invited to move here and pursue the “American Dream.” What was supposed to stop the Jewish takeover? Slogans about the inherent dignity and equality of all human beings? Lectures on the “true meaning” of the US Constitution?
Liberal republicanism attacks anti-Semitism at every angle by stressing our common humanity, by insisting that all human beings, including Jews, have equal rights and should be treated as individuals, by making universalism the litmus test of morality, and demonizing the use of force against any religious minority as rank bigotry, prejudice, xenophobia, etc, etc. Maybe you can’t see the cause and effect relationship, but others are able to do so.
Rich people like Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, are all in favor of having sexual slaves. Unfortunately, it didn’t transform them into conservatives.
“In France, Jews were emancipated by the French Revolution after centuries of marginalization.”
There were few of them. The idea was to destroy them by absorption.
“the republican ideas of the Revolution – religious tolerance, militant secularism, radical individualism, equal rights under the law, and unfettered freedom”
Their specialty was to chop heads. Not very tolerant. After the revolution, the “jacobins” managed to cling to power from one generation to the next. They used public office to steal while spewing sophistry. They never believed their own BS. They played on people’s gullibility and probably used dirty tricks to stay in power. They mostly remained a small clique based in Paris, in opposition to the real country. And their small clique became more and more Jewish over time.
“The republican political culture of the United States, which sees Jews through the lens of universalism, individualism, and egalitarianism, is the reason why anti-Semitism has never gained traction here.”
The real reason why there is little resistance to Jewish supremacism is that they are in power. They did not get in power thanks to their great respect for republican values. Their favored method is secret networking, and buying up newspapers and non-Jewish politicians. Those tactics fly in the face of republican values. Many people can see that and would speak up about it and try to fix things if they were not prevented to do so by the Jews themselves.
“Why wouldn’t Jews own huge media conglomerates?” / “Because of republicanism”
If not for the Jews, Western democracies would have imposed anti-trust laws in the media a long time ago, in the name of republicanism.
“Why wouldn’t Jewish oligarchs like Soros be corrupting our political system?”
That’s what I’m saying too: the Jews corrupt republican ideals. You should not blame republican ideals for being corrupted by the Jews.
Democracy cannot work if there is any Jewish influence. There is no guarantee that it will start working when we get rid of the Jews, but at least, the government will stop trying to destroy the White race.
“by stressing our common humanity, by insisting that all human beings…”
It’s mainly the Jews who say that.
Sometimes, White people will adhere to misguided universalistic principles, but they are not suicidal. They would revise their views and bring corrections to the system if they were not prevented to do so.
Well this was certainly brilliant! A few points of order; go back and read what the Anti-federalists said would happen to the United States under the Constitution. Some predicted it would devolve in rule by Judicial decree. I am glad to see many now recognize that out case transcends the South and the Confederacy. What good does it do to preserve Southern symbols while ignoring demography which will just render the lower south a Republic of New Africa if not checked in time.
Might I suggest our ideology should be based on a through examination of the Conservative Revolution ideology which originated in Germany between the two world wars. Read the writings of Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. One might also examine what defines Liberal Modernity. Its seems as if Yockey is about to become a lot more relevant especially as regards the rise of Russia.Some synthesis of the above ideologies seem the way to go. Think racially, act globally!
This has been a fine discussion. Some very strong points all around.
More is coming.
Re Immigration. If say or do nothing about this criminal third world invasion, you are part of the problem. Keep in contact with your elected reps; consistently go to the polls and vote against the true enemy of the white race: the Democratic Party; do yourgardening, don’t eat out and do your own laundry; go to numbersusa and join other organization that advocate a reduction in immigration. Make no mistake, this third world assault is a form of genocide against America’s white.
Re: Armor
The Republic also abolished slavery and made every negro in the French Empire into a French citizen.
1.) The Left has always preached “tolerance” while practicing fanatical intolerance in fidelity to their abstract principles. Reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries have always been beyond the pale.
2.) The Republic emancipated Jews out of fidelity to the abstract principles of religious tolerance and equal rights.
No, the Jacobins were put in their place by Napoleon, who was in turn defeated by Britain its allies. The Bourbons were restored to power only to later fall to subsequent experiments in republicanism. In France, slavery was abolished by the Republic, restored by Napoleon, and later abolished again at the start of the Second Republic.
Jews have always worked closely with renegade Whites imbued with the revolutionary spirit of “liberty and equality.” They still do in this country and every other Western country.
Why is that? Republicanism put them on the same level as non-Jews.
– First, they were welcomed to the United States with open arms, where they were treated from the beginning as individuals with all the rights and liberties of other citizens.
– Second, they took advantage of the republican order to create a series of tight knit organizations to advance their interests and to make huge sums of money, which was later used to fund those organizations.
– Third, they used republicanism as their battering ram to break into elite institutions, whether it was Ivy League universities or Wall Street firms, or to use the doctrine of property rights to buy up newspapers or create organs to influence public opinion like Hollywood studios.
– Finally, once they had climbed to the peak of the American social pyramid, which was roughly between the 1930s and 1970s, they began to takeover the Democratic Party and pour money into political races.
None of this would have been possible if it were not for the preexisting republican regime.
All of which is sacrosanct and permitted under the liberal republican regime. That’s nothing more than unfettered freedom, religious tolerance, equal rights, and property rights taken to its logical conclusion.
Not really.
In the beginning, it was all justified as free speech, property rights, and individual rights during the takeover. Once the scale of dominance tipped in their favor, free speech and individual rights were rolled back in the name of fighting “hate speech” in countries like France. Were it not for the First Amendment, it would have happened here too.
Republicanism is 1.) why he is a citizen, 2.) why he has made so much money, and 3.) why he is able to get away with doing this.
In every case that comes to mind, liberal republicanism has always evolved into full blown democracy, and those democracies have always expanded their electorates over time to become more inclusive. That’s just the nature of the system which is based on numbers and factions that rip apart the social fabric.
Translation: liberals.
Liberals like the American Founders who made appeals to “mankind” or their Jacobin counterparts in France.
That’s absurd.
The Whites will just follow their universalist values to their logical conclusion. They will expand the electorate to include Jews and blacks. They will throw open their borders rather than “discriminate” against anyone.
This appears “suicidal” to people who are not drinking the republican koolaid, but for those who really believe in that nonsense there is no sense of group identity and hence no awareness that the welfare of the group to which they belong is at stake.
There’s a huge difference between seeing rights as, say, the “rights of Englishmen” which are particular and rooted in the history, culture, and traditions of the English people, which are transmitted by blood and which may vary across social station without creating “contradictions,” and making the leap from that to the “principles” of universal natural rights, an ideological doctrine of abstract equal rights, which are the rights of all of “mankind” and something similar to Newton’s physical laws, which the Founding Fathers and their counterparts in Revolutionary France did in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Madison says:
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
Madison is assuming that the people would be vicious and that his constitutional machinery can account for this by dividing power across multiple institutions and creating high barriers to surmount to enact fundamental changes in the Constitution.
It doesn’t matter. Among many others, the circumstances of Cicero’s gruesome death are sufficient to show the low regard for abstract individual rights in Ancient Rome, whether it was in the Republic or the Empire.
George III never incited the Indians against the colonists. The Seven Years’ War, the Proclamation of 1763, and maintaining a standing army in America were all designed to establish peace on the frontier. It was the Americans who disturbed the frontier by constantly encroaching on Indian lands which was a process that continued for well over a century after Britain was evicted from America.
The colonists would have been justified in rebelling against the British Empire if King George III was somehow plotting their racial destruction, but that’s absurd and no historian that I know of takes that charge seriously. Instead, the Americans launched a revolution over a few trivial taxes on things like sugar, tea, and stamps because they were outraged over the notion that they should make any financial contribution at all to paying the bill for their own defense.
Yes, I have.
The Revolution was started in New England by smugglers who were outraged that their “liberty” was violated by having to pay taxes and aggrieved land speculators in Virginia who were pissed off about being temporarily shut out of Transappalachia in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War.
Britain blundered into the war because King George III and Parliament were unable to grasp the colonist’s position that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies, but the Crown should simultaneously shoulder the entire financial burden of fighting world wars against France for their benefit.
The British had always fought with Indian allies in North America. That was standard practice, and the Americans knew that before starting the war.
Take note that the Declaration of Independence was signed over a year after the American Revolution had begun at Lexington and Concord.
The colonists knew full well that Britain had always fought with Indian allies in North America as well as foreign mercenaries in their conflicts in Europe. The use of foreign mercenaries and Indian allies was standard practice, and the colonists had brought that down upon themselves by starting a war over a few trivial taxes.
I notice you failed to mention here that the Americans formed a military alliance with France and Spain. They laughably denounced George III, a constitutional monarch with limited powers, as a despicable tyrant, while fighting on the side of Louis XVI.
The colonial charters were issued at a time when the geography of North America was poorly understood. The borders of Connecticut, for example, theoretically stretched to the Pacific Ocean. Like the Proclamation of 1763, the purpose of the Quebec Act was to quell violence on the frontier by keeping out the horde of land speculators who had previously embroiled the frontier in a bloody and expensive world war.
Historians agree that its true cause was that the colonists were outraged at having to pay taxes on things like stamps. They were outraged at having to obey the Navigation Acts. They denied that Parliament had any right to tax the colonies.
Just to add a little more complexity to an already complex question, some the colonial courthouses that took down their portraits of George III put up portraits of Louis xvi. While some radicals, such as Jefferson, were opposed to monarchy, Hamilton was not alone in wishing for one. Also, the drive for independence in the North was caused in part by paranoia because many Protestant ministers saw the actions of the mother country as part of a Catholic conspiracy, since they thought that George III had secretly converted to Catholicism.
The revolution was a mess and caused because Colonists simply argued themselves into one because they didn’t want to obey reasonable acts by the home country.
It’s amazing how much liberty the colonists had before the Revolution that something as trivial as the Stamp Act would set off such an explosion. The colonies had more autonomy than the states ever did under the US Constitution and “states rights.”
Me: “After the revolution, the Jacobins managed to cling to power from one generation to the next.”
Hunter: “No, the Jacobins were put in their place by Napoleon, who was in turn defeated by Britain its allies. The Bourbons were restored to power only to later fall to subsequent experiments in republicanism.”
What I mean is that, no matter what wikipedia says (White Terror), those who espoused or admired the views of the revolutionary Jacobins were not wiped out as they should have been by the returning French royalists or by the European coalition that beat Napoleon. That made it possible for the Jacobins or their like-minded admirers to later creep back to power.
The French succession of republican and monarchical governments was like this :
… – 1789 Monarchy
1789-1804 Revolution period
1804-1815 Napoleon
1815-1830 Monarchy
1830-1848 Monarchy
1848-1852 Republic
1852-1870 Empire (Napoleon Junior)
1871-1940 Republic
1940-1944 German occupation + Vichy government
1944- … Return of the Jews
The conservatives, when they were in power, should have wiped out the Jacobins, who were probably only a small minority on the republican political left. But instead of that, the conservatives, over the years, have progressively absorbed the views of the crazy leftists.
“Reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries have always been beyond the pale.”
On the contrary, they failed to do their job and wipe out the crazy leftist psychopaths.
“The Republic also abolished slavery and made every negro in the French Empire into a French citizen.”
It didn’t matter, the Blacks lived on far off islands. Unlike today, there was no desire to kill the White race. As for the decision to (try to) integrate the Jews, the dire consequences were simply underestimated. The French revolutionaries did not carefully consider the pros and cons of every decision. They were unpredictable morons.
Here is a paragraph from the French wikipedia about the “emancipation” of the Jews (my translation):
On January 18, 1791, a new attempt was made [in the parliament] for the complete emancipation of the Jews. The Prince de Broglie opposed it, saying: “This whole intrigue has long been under preparation by four or five powerful Jews settled in the department of Bas-Rhin. One of them (Cerf Berr), who has gained immense fortune at the government’s expense, has long been spreading considerable amounts of money in Paris so as to get support and protectors”.
I guess the Prince de Broglie was right. The deciding factor must have been Jewish stolen money, not liberalism.
K.R. Bolton has an article up at Counter Currents that is germane to the debate about republicanism. Bolton discusses the Hebdo killings and traces a direct line from Jacobinism and “Rights of Man” Republicanism to the profane worldview of Charlie Hebdo.
I’m gradually falling into your camp, Hunter, but I still can’t say I like the new flag. We’ve got a perfectly good series of them that everyone already associates with the South. Bad marketing.