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I don't think I need to be a "right-winger" or "base my ideas on moronic progressive polemics about race" to notice a thing that is happening.
Though perhaps not quite as "black-pilled" as they are, my feelings mirror those of @FCfromSSC. What good is "Shared civilization, culture, blood" to me when weighed against having to share a space with people who actively wants me, my family, and everyone who shares my cultural beliefs dead? Is it really even a shared civilization or culture at that point?
Those are the questions that I am trying to get at when I ask whether someone of European descent who votes for a progressive is really "white"?
Simon Bolivar decided that to secure the independence of Venezuela, he would order the execution of any Spaniard or Canarian who was not actively helping the rebels, whereas any criollo, even a collaborator with the Spanish, would be spared from harm. He correctly thought that whether one was a peninsulare or a South American was more important to the conflict he was fighting than the specific issue of who had been on what side in the first part of the Venezuelan war of independence. These people were actually killing each other at scale too, not just talking tough online. I'm clearly not going to talk you out of hating left-wingers and that's not really even my intention, but that doesn't change the fact that they undeniably share a civilization, culture, and blood with you.
Do you not have a single liberal family member? I just don't see how people can see someone who looks, talks, and behaves like their annoying aunt at thanksgiving and decide they are equivalent to a foreigner in Dearborn who supports Al-Qaeda.
Whether someone is white or not is a biological fact. You're welcome to decide that some whites are your enemy but that doesn't make them somehow not white.
What you are describing above was Bolivar’s “War to the Death”. That was a policy of the failed second Venezuelan republic, which principally failed since they were unable to get the mixed race Venezuelans on their side and winded up getting overrun by murder cowboys. The mestizos and pardos figured criollo rule would be more intrusive that distant peninsular rule.
The third republic, the one that succeeded in securing independence from Spain, avoided earlier atrocities and intentionally tried to get all the inhabitants of Venezuela, including peninsulares, on their side. They intentionally flipped the support of pardos and mestizos and made racial equality a part of their platform.
Ultimately, the lesson of Venezuela, and you have similar stories in the rest of LATAM, is that your friends are those who act as your friends and your enemies are those who act as your enemies. Alliances shift even if immutable characteristics don’t.
I think the core issue with White Nationalism is that it doesn’t map on the lived experience friend/enemy distinction of most people. For a white red triber, the Latino who goes to his church and is his coworker is practically far more his brother than a white blue triber sneering at him. The same is true vice versa for the white blue triber and his East colleague. While immigrant groups differ, Somalis are not Mexicans, it seems one should determine friend/enemy based on the actions of the person, not the race.
Sure, in practice I think very few people are going to make that kind of distinction in their personal lives based purely on race. I certainly don't. But the societies and neighborhoods we live in express of the character of the people who live in them, and that does depend on race and ethnicity. East Asian and Hispanic neighborhoods are worse to live in and other white people agree with me whether or not they will admit it because they move away from them to live around other whites! This alone should be reason enough to care about the ancestry of the people in your society.
Agreed.
I think this statement is true, but the dispute is over what heritage matters and how much. I think the way the US classifies race, which from my understanding is similar to the rest of the Anglosphere, in particular is not really that determinative of neighborhood character in most cases. To give an example: a fully Charedim neighborhood is more different than a normie white suburb than a normie white suburb is from a normie Texas suburb, which is often only plurality non-hispanic white.
In the US that's not necessarily the case. Gentrification generally is mostly white upper middle class and middle class people moving into Hispanic neighborhoods. Same with historic East Asian neighborhoods. In the US it's really only black neighborhoods that tend to be dysfunctional enough to preclude gentrification. Many neighborhoods, especially in California, have actually gone through the process of blacks -> illegal immigrants (hispanics) move in -> the neighborhood becomes mostly hispanic -> the neighborhood is now nice enough for middle class people to move into.
I agree with this, but your argument is more particular than this general statement: your argument is that different groups of western whites are fundamentally bound to each other due to shared heritage and that both normatively and positively binds them more closely to each other than to any other group. That is the part I, and it seems many others here, are disputing.
The reason why I mentioned the Hispanic church goer and the Asian coworker is that in terms of daily lives, those two have far more in common with their white counterparts than their white counterparts have with each other. In many cases, they are literally family to each other and often have offspring with each other. They all are part of shared communities, and typically follow their communities norms even when it conflicts with their 'racial interest'. Witness how 'Stop Asian Hate' hit a brick wall once people started noticing most of the assailants were black. I think these communities are the real fundamental bedrock of most people's identities and morals rather than their race.
(The following is for the US case. Different nations have different histories and situations, so it may not apply to other nations.)
Probably the biggest reason why White Nationalism is not viable, at least in the short to medium term, is that it asks whites to basically jettison their lived experience and say that their in-group is not the people who they actually live with and form a real community with, but instead people who they share a census category with. This is a romantic nationalist project, and like all of those projects people are going to ask 'Why should I practically identify with this constructed nation?" This is especially the case when that constructed nation excludes members of a person's community and often own family too.
'White Nationalism' is a newly constructed 'nation' as well; historically the US combined civic nationalism with the belief that certain races and ethnicities were incapable/unwilling of fulfilling the duties of citizenship. Americans viewed themselves as a confederation of different states, ethnicities, sections, and religions bound together by a common civic state and culture; they never viewed themselves as a singular and uniform, or made to be uniform, people. You can contrast this with many European national states, who did envision and enforce a uniform culture on their nations. The viewpoint that America is a civic nationalist state where not all cultures can fulfill the duties of citizenship is still alive today. It's currently the dominant view, at least in terms of popular vote, on the right. There are disputes over which cultures don't/can't integrate, but that viewpoint is within the Overton Window of the US right wing. Similarly, most of the other moderate demands a white nationalist would have, like strong policing and/or an end to anti-white racial discrimination, are already within the Overton Window of the US right wing. There is no real policy incentive for someone to adopt white nationalism vs. a conservative US civic nationalism.
Summing it up:
Your conception of US "civic nationalism" isn't very historical given that it practiced what you describe as "White Nationalism" for 150 years. In practice, people from different communities were expected to assimilate and intermarry and that's exactly why non-whites were not allowed to immigrate - read the decision in US vs Bhagat Singh Thind:
"It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white. The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation."
I was just arguing with people who advocated for a constructed nation of "Reds" which would presumably exclude one's liberal family members. How is that any less impracticable?
Doesn't this argue against including Asians as "on the team" with white people considering its advocates were happy to spread slander about white Americans but draw the line at black Americans? Clearly they are more aware of their racial position in American society than you are.
People in Latin America don't seem to think the way that I do and probably agree with you about civic nationalism but it's pretty clear that the more ethnically European parts of Latin America are more agreeable to people of European descent and this is generally more important than the partisan orientation of the government. This is basically what I'm arguing. No matter how nice your Asian coworkers are (and they generally are), at scale they reproduce an Asian culture in the places they live. This is true of Asians, American whites, Russians, Indians, Mexicans, and so on, and that is what binds whites in America together whether they like it or not.
That case is more evidence of 'the US is a civic nation that Indians can't assimilate into' than 'the US is a nation of white people or a subset thereof.' By then, you had the 14th Amendment giving blacks citizenship, the 1917 granting of Puerto Ricans citizenship, and the 1920s granting of Amerindians citizenship. I agree with you that the US of the time was White Supremacist and that it was part of the US legal architecture at the time. You also did have a minority of Americans, such as the Know Nothings, arguing for an explicitly ethnic conception of the US.
What I'm arguing is kind of a finer point; the bulk of Americans did not say "We are a nation of a specific ethnicity/ethnos that people assimilate into.". The bulk of Americans then said instead "We are a nation of different peoples tied together by common civic rules and a common civic culture. Non-whites are to a greater or lesser extent incapable of fulfilling the duties of citizenship." While in practice those identities are quite similar in many aspects, they are conceptually different and those differences do have practical effects.
Most white nationalists argue for the first identity, which is ahistorical. For white nationalists who argue for the second identity, they are arguing for a historic identity. The argument there is a factual question of if x/y/z group is unable/unwilling to assimilate.
I can't speak for their arguments, but I have my own viewpoint on this. I think a sort of "Red Tribe" nationalism is not workable. Red Tribe is a pretty heterogenous coalition of people. There are various groups of Christians, rural groups, working class groups, and other groups. There are also groups like Conservative Blue Tribers and Hispanic Evangelicals who are non-central cases. They are bound together in agreement on certain baseline values, but it is neither desirable or practical to try and separate those groups from other groups in the US at the moment. At the same time, the Right should practice patronage for the groups that support and ignore the groups that don't; not act as stewards of the entire nation.
One thing I think may elucidate my viewpoint is to contrast what I'm saying above with the mid/late 20th century US right. From the Civil War to the Great Depression, a reasonable oversimplification of US politics would be that Republicans were the party of Yankees who wanted to turn all of the US into Yankee-stan, economic policies included, and the Democrats where the party of all the different groups who did not want that. There was a national identity and patriotism, but the Republicans never got the unified and uniform national culture they wanted. With the New Deal, WW2, the Television, and national economic and cultural integration you really had a strong, semi-uniform national identity for the first time in the mid 20th century.
As a result of the semi-uniform national identity and preexisting trends, the Republicans in the mid to late 20th century changed their self image to desiring to be the party of the American mainstream/middle class. They considered themselves stewards of the nation in general. Patronage still existed, but the Republicans even as they became the explicitly right wing party in the 80s still viewed themselves as the party of the whole country. The cultural consensus, if it ever existed in reality, that Republicans viewed themselves as the representatives of no longer exists. As a result, they should simply be an interest party of their constituents and cooperate only on mutually beneficial policies.
The reason I mentioned this is that it is a case of Asians putting the interests/cultural values of Blue Tribe over their own 'racial interests'. If Asians were maximally ethnocentric, they would not have stopped pushing Stop Asian Hate once the focus got on black criminals. That they stopped shows that blue-tribe Asians value blue-tribe norms over personal ethnocentrism. If you look at how they vote and act, red-tribe Hispanics either value red-tribe norms over being Hispanic or view it as no conflict.
You listed American whites and Russians as peoples that create separate cultures when they congregate. What do you consider to be the descent that people should rally around? How much of that inheritance is genetic vs. cultural? Since you separated the above two, it seems we are talking in terms more granular than the big three races. My particular issue is that I don't think European descent is a good dividing line for 'makes a good neighbor' and 'want to share a body politic' with.
My reading of stuff like the 1790 Immigration Act and that court case suggests that historically there was a specifically "white" conception of American nationhood with "whites" as the titular ethnicity of America the way Germans are in Germany or Russians are in Russia. A lot of immigrants, oddly enough, seem to agree with me and call whites "Americans" while referring to other people by their ethnic backgrounds. I don't think that most Americans before the 19th/20th century diasporas identified strongly with their particular European roots as some happy coalition of groups of Dutchmen, Englishmen, Scotsmen, etc coming together to be Americans, these people were already mixing in large numbers and creating a new people before the Revolution, I believe Jefferson wrote about this. Regional and state identity was a lot stronger but I don't see how that's really so different than Germans or Italians having regional identities.
I basically agree with your thoughts on "Red Tribe" nationalism. You may have picked up that I'm a very right-leaning "blue," culturally speaking, which leaves me as a bit of an awkward member of the Republican coalition. I'm not necessarily arguing that the right in general should be spending lots of effort trying to win over white left-wingers, my point that started the whole discussion is more that a white progressive is meaningfully part of a cultural ingroup that a Muslim immigrant isn't.
It's cool and good when we can make common ground politically with immigrants or people from other cultures, but there are a lot more meaningful differences than just political ones. I would go farther and say that I prefer to live in a more left-leaning white area to a right-leaning Asian one and I think most whites would agree with me given experience living in heavily Asian areas. Their norms on education, family, work, and many other things are radically different and create an environment that is pretty unpleasant for whites even in the absence of racial animosity. A piece of evidence for this viewpoint is white flight from what are otherwise extremely wealthy and well-functioning Asian suburbs. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to prefer progressive whites as neighbors but conservative Asians as voters. I think my case for white progressives is much stronger with (some groups of) Muslims, who are not only foreign like East Asians but outright hostile.
As for descent, American whites are mostly Northwest Europeans with some ancestry from assimilated people from outside of there. The heterogeneity of modern American whites is seems hugely overstated to me when considering that the majority of them have the majority of their ancestry from closely related parts of Europe like the British Isles and Germany. They are not quite as perfectly defined an ethnic group as Afrikaners but it seems to me that there's clearly an ethnic core and recognizable group of people. Whites from Northwestern Europe tend to build meaningfully different societies than whites from Southern or Eastern Europe, which is why I brought up the Russians. I think this is an underrated challenge of Latin American immigration - even if our Hispanic immigrants were 100% white Iberian Spaniards they would be much more alien to American culture than a German or Brit. We can look at the challenges caused by Italian immigration and note that proportionally, there are 5 times as many Hispanics (and soon more than that), and extrapolate from that.
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Serious question, do you believe that whether or not a person is "white" is something that I should care about more than whether or not they want me dead?
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