America was historically a majority white nation. By opening America’s borders to a tidal wave of Third World mass immigration and the relentless pushing of identity politics for everybody but white people by the Cultural Left, the US white population has been driven to a type of implicit white identity politics too, which is what Trumpism was in part about.
If the same policies are continued, there will be a massive shift to explicit white identitarian movements in America, and in Europe too, since white people will start to realise that – with low fertility rates and massive immigration – they will become minorities in their own nations, and perhaps even hated and persecuted minorities.
As Western nations are turned into multicultural states, modern democracy and politics will cease to exist as we know them. Instead, Western nations will see the Islamisation of their societies, their transformation into dysfunctional, Balkanised areas with rent-seeking nepotistic and mutually hostile ethnic and religious groups fighting for control of the state, and in conflict because of their own mutually-incompatible ethnic/religious interests. In that world, white identitarian politics will be a matter of survival for white people.
Quite possibly, democracy itself will not even survive in an extremely multicultural Europe or America, and Julian Assange pointed to this fact about multicultural Singapore:
This is also why the kind of class-based politics of economic justice – so beloved by the old Labour, Social Democratic, or Democratic Socialist Left – cannot survive in the multicultural society. An effective Social Democratic vision for the Western world – or indeed virtually any society – with left heterodox economic policies entails a high trust and, whether leftists like it or not, a highly homogeneous society.
Now you would think that a sane, reasonable, rational Left would actually want to create a society where its own politics can work, and be opposed to the looming multicultural disaster. But – in reality – most of the Left these days is unwittingly in favour of the disaster happening, even if they don’t consciously understand what the consequences of their policies will be.
If people on the Left wanted to halt and reverse the rise of far-right white identitarian politics, then the pragmatic solution is clear enough: support closed borders and immigration restriction, and work to create a sane Left that is purged of Cultural Leftism and its identity politics. The Left should also support some kind of civilised Nationalism too, with the understanding that nations are based on social cohesion, and that people need national homelands where they are majorities to flourish.
We have already seen that this pragmatic approach to immigration or national identity was supported by socialists of the past (see here, here, here), and there is no reason why we can’t have such a reasonable Left once again. Even John Maynard Keynes, for example, would never have supported the insanity of the modern multicultural Liberal Left and their stances on open borders.
The traditional Leftist concern for the Third World (which I support) can then be based around reform of the international economic institutions, the abolition of Neoliberalism, and development aid using Post Keynesian economics, so that people in the Third World can attain strong economic and social development in their own nations, instead of wanting to come in the millions into ours.
I think the route is to promote patriotism rather than nationalism (h/t Noah Smith) and focus on citizens rather than immigrants, eschewing racism in favor of common unity. Even if majority white, it has always been mixed and divisiveness works counter to that.
ReplyDeleteTrump has been very consistently doing this btw. American citizens > all others.
DeleteAmericans are very patriotic (muh military, muh flag, muh freedom) but this has not prevented the rise of racial conflict in politics.
DeleteYour prescription is the same as neoliberalism - the citizen is the person abstracted into a theoretical frame of reference. It ignores a vast swathe of human experience, where conflict emerges.
Eventually civic nationanalism undermines itself because it involves taking the implicit norms of the white majority, and imposing them on minority groups (Jews, blacks, Hispanics, etc). Invariably, this creates resentment leading to 'muh cultural leftist politics'.
DeleteProvide a guaranteed middle class level of income and macro stability with universal dividend and retail product discount policies...and most of the zenophobia or multicultural complaint will crawl back under its rock or otherwise disperse.
ReplyDeleteSurveys showed Republican voters in key swing states like Ohio were reacting to perceived cultural/racial threat first and foremost, not economic motives.
DeleteLK you have to get these egalitarian materialists, who think man lives by bread alone, out of your camp. The only difference they have with the centre right is the model of distribution. They're still subscribe to the view money and goods = successful polity.
This white identity stuff is asserted without evidence. Romney got a higher % white vote than Trump. Trump did better with minorities that Romney did. Trump's appeal is class based more than race based IMO.
ReplyDeleteTrump won every category of whites except women with graduate degrees.
DeleteHow about Romney? The argument is that suddenly whites voted for Trump for tribal reasons. But that is contrary to how he did with whites compared to other candidates. Trump did not win whites by more than his predecessors but by less. He did not do worse with non whites than his predecessor but better.
DeleteExcellent article, LK.
ReplyDeleteSome of the commentary here about civic nationalism is also correct, I think. One does not become Australian, or American or Vietnamese simply by moving countries and claiming to support whatever groupthink happens to be fashionable with the ruling elite at the time (muh values). This is why Turnbull's new Australian citizenship test is such a waste of effort.
Nationality is genetic, historic and cultural.
It may be that in future, Western countries (the things we call 'nation states') are actually administrative states fixed to a geographical area, but governing multiple separate nations. Thus, indigenous Australians would be a separate nation to white Australians, but we'd share a state apparatus that might seek to provide some autonomy for each nation.
The current UK is an example of this model, there being no British nation as such - there's a British state governing English, Scots, Welsh and Ulster nationalities.
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Nationality is not genetic. The conflation of ethnicity and nationality is simply incorrect, as a matter of definition.
DeleteBy whose definition?
DeleteThe Cambridge English dictionary provides two meanings of ‘nationality’.
One is the legalistic definition; ‘the official right to belong to a particular country’. This is how it’s now used for determining whether someone is eligible for a passport, or other bureaucratic purposes.
The second definition goes to the biological and cultural basis of nationality. It is; ‘a group of people of the same race, religion, traditions etc’.
As above, if I were to move to Thailand and pronounce myself to be a Thai, most Thais would understand that I meant that I had become a citizen of the Thai state. If, however, I insisted that I was of the Thai nationality, they would think me mentally unstable. I am clearly not - and can never be - a Thai person.
Many on the Fake Left conflate the state with the nation, when the two are entirely different things. Why? I suspect it’s because the organic nation is a major inconvenience to the globalist, one-world vision. It is no coincidence that the same vision drives neo-liberal capitalism in all its worst forms.
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I have been reading your blog lately, and I enjoy it a lot and I agree with most of your criticisms of 'identity politics' as far as I understand the term.
ReplyDeleteBut I think some of what you say goes too far and ask you to consider two groups in my own country of the USA- African-Americans and Native Americans.
Neither of these groups here began as willing members of today's dominant culture. And I imagine that quite a few wished they could be allowed to be, but were refused even so.
They are at least as American as I am and probably more so. Who are you to say that they don't have issues they feel affect them as a group and that they shouldn't use group politics to help them address those issues?
I personally believe the 'capitalists' have exploited group differences to benefit themselves at the expense of working 'class' overall. But that does not mean that some groups don't have very legitimate gripes that need to be addressed.
Some really interesting points that you raise, Jerry,
DeleteTo my mind, nationality is like an extended family tree, with the addition of a shared culture, history, homeland and self-awareness as a distinct group.
By this definition, indigenous Americans and African Americans are separate nations to White Americans. All three might share the same homelands and State apparatus. And that's OK. But - in my view - all three would be better off being given a degree of autonomy by the State.
Capitalism is intent on exploiting the differences between nations living under the same state because it undermines any working class solidarity that might organically arise in an ethnostate.
There's a reason why socialist economics is best supported in homogeneous nations..
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It does not seem as though Assange has read much John C. Calhoun. In the US, White identity politics is as old as the hills. To be sure, by the mid to late 20th century, it had largely disguised itself, hence the term, "real Americans", which did not refer to American Indians, as one might have expected. What appears to Assange to be a White identity politics in reaction to minority identity politics is merely a relabeling of what never disappeared.
ReplyDeleteI had the privilege of growing up in the Deep South, and also the privilege of living in Hawaii for a couple of years. In the South, "That's mighty White of you," was considered a compliment, at least among White people. White people did not discover their Whiteness in the face of Black Power. In Hawaii when I was there some people identified 18 different ethnic groups, which were related to class. Hawaii was not a melting pot, and there was interethnic tension, but by and large people from different groups got along, and everybody said, "You lucky you live Hawaii."