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When in history has a civilization ever referred to an intellectual tradition? Egypt? Rome? Greece? India? China? They all have had intellectual traditions that defined their consciousness, and those traditions were very different from ours such that we probably could not relate much to their way of thinking of the world.
But Civilization refers to a peoples, and that people's essence and continuity, prestige and hegemony.
Your notion that your own civilization was created and is defined by an idea and not a people is extremely particular and it doesn't generalize anywhere else in history. Is Chinese civilization "an idea?" Chinese intellectual tradition has been highly dynamic, and this serves to contrast the alt-right view with your own.
The alt-right view is essentially that Civilization is how I described it- it's built and maintained by a people, and if you replace those people with other people then you are a complete fool if you expect continuity in the spiritual essence of that civilization. History shows that never, ever happens.
It's the people that create the intellectual tradition, mostly a subset of highly influential intellectual and cultural leaders. In turn, the intellectual tradition over time directs the people towards a common end. It even forms them genetically over larger time horizons. This is the interaction between Civilization and intellectual tradition, but they are not equivalent.
In contrast, you seem to view civilization as a dogged commitment to an idea. The alt-right world view is clearly superior to the conservative worldview on this front.
The Progressivism we know today is only the newest mutation of that synthesis of semitic mysticism and Greek/Roman formalism. The alt-right is correct to view that intellectual tradition as something that should be rejected or moved beyond in order to save civilization or build a better one.
Replace in what sense? If I take all Ethiopians and transplant them in Egypt, I have no doubt the Egyptian civilization would be fundamentally different. In a sense, it died when it was populated by people who were not raised in it at all.
But you seem to be arguing that it is fundamentally impossible to continue a civilization w/o its founders. The go-to counter-example would be assimilating foreigners into your culture. Or would you argue that foreigners are by definition people not interested in taking on your culture?
Civilization is such a massive ship that of course it's going to continue in some form and on some trajectory without its founders. Likewise, civilizational decline is so huge that it can't really be turned on a dime. I am speaking more to the self-defeating ethos of conservatism: people don't matter in their essence, or they are at least interchangeable, only ideas matter and that's what should be conserved.
You can't conserve an idea if you don't conserve a people, that's my argument. Civilization is not an idea, it's a people.
But in the sense of say, American civilization, there are no people. America is a country but it isn't a nation. It was diverse at its founding, both ethnically and religiously, and it's hard to point to one group as having had an outsized influence on the development of American civilization, both in the founding era and going forward. Which is why the American alt-right nationalism never made intellectual sense, because it's argument is essentially ahistorical.
All civilization has a level of ethnic diversity. That doesn't at all undermine my point, that changing the people would change the civilization. Russia is diverse, but if it became majority Hispanic in 100 years, you wouldn't say "well that doesn't matter because Russia was already diverse." It would obviously change the nature and trajectory of Russian civilization.
To say that it's hard to point at a closely-related subset of groups that have had an "outsized influence" on the development of Western, and American, civilization is just exceedingly obtuse. It was obviously founded and developed as a European civilization with European population groups that colonized the nation.
American alt-right concerns over race are far more aligned with the historical concerns of the founders and public opinion all the way through the end of the second world war and beyond. The idea that "America is an idea and race doesn't matter" is a post-war retcon that is ahistorical with respect to the establishment of American civilization.
The reason alt-right nationalism doesn't make sense is because the ship has sailed, and demographic change is baked into the cake and there's no realistic future in which it does not happen. It's not something that can any more be opposed, it just has to be considered a premise to political and cultural thinking moving forward. But unlike Hlynka, who would maintain optimism that the people don't matter as long as we cling to the same ideas, it's the alt-right that is aware of the revolutionary consequences of demographic change and the incoherence of a conservative mindset in the face of such changes.
But it also presents an opportunity to jettison the toxic "intellectual traditions" and advocate for ones that are better.
Well, no. It wasn't founded as a European civilization, it was founded first as an extension of the British Empire and later as an explicit rejection of traditional European civilization. Enlightenment ideals were certainly European in origin, but they were specifically northern, Protestant European in origin at the very widest definition, and for all practical purposes were English and Scottish in origin. The Italians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. had little to nothing to do with Enlightenment thought. And in practice most of Europe was living under a system much more illiberal than that which the colonists were rebelling against.
So to say that the American civilization was founded by Europeans may be a true statement, but if the founders had any nationalist tendencies at the time, they would have been limited to those of English and maybe Scottish or Dutch descent. Those who were wont to deny various outsider groups status as "real Americans" set their sights first on Swedes and German Protestants in the 18th century, then on Irish and German Catholics in the 19th, then on Poles, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Rusyns, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes in the early 20th. Is that the argument you're making now, that the only true inheritors of the American civilization are Anglo-Saxons? If not, why not?
You are begging the question and in fact proving my point. Nobody considers the rise of American hegemony to be a break from "Western Civilization"; America is included in that fold despite those liberal innovations in its intellectual tradition. The continuity between the British Empire and American Empire within the broader framework of Western Civilization proves my argument that the West is not defined by a grand intellectual tradition, it's defined by the behavior of European people which has formulated different intellectual ideas at different points of time and in different contexts.
In the American context, liberalism can and should be seen an an innovation on the organization of power, and a (largely post-hoc) intellectual justification for rebellion and legitimacy, with Social Contract theory being hardly less of a "noble lie" than the Divine Right.
An intellectual tradition is a tool of a people or civilization to coordinate behavior and consensus, and justify the use of power. But it's dynamic, an intellectual tradition does not define a civilization.
The entire point is that post-Christianity and post-liberalism may be necessary for the future of Western Civilization. The emergence of liberalism itself proves that radicalism may be conducive for the growth of Civilization if it improves upon or replaces deficiencies with traditional ways of thinking.
Hlynka's arguments could have been, and were, cited by Loyalist traditionalists who opposed the emergence of secular, radical, liberal political thinking. He probably would have opposed those liberal radicals questioning the Divine-Right precepts of Western Civilization in those days.
You're missing my point. I'm not arguing that America is a break from "Western Civilization", I'm arguing that "Western Civilization" is too broad a concept to consider as the basis for nationhood, as is evidenced by the fact that America's founders certainly didn't see it that way (they were arguing for liberal principles, not that the colonies were a separate nation from Britain), and to the extent that some of them did view it as a nation, their conception of that nation was limited to exclude most Europeans. In any event, it still doesn't account for why the alt-right excludes Jews, despite them being as Western as anyone else on the list.
Your argument, read over several posts, seems to be that where we "draw the line" on who assimilates into the American nation is largely arbitrary and has changed over the centuries. In support of this point you mention the different immigrant groups people have complained about over the years, which, of course, has included many different sorts of non-Anglo-Saxon white people. And you accurately mention that the origins of American civilization are specifically English and Northwestern European Protestant, not Italian, Hungarian, Polish, etc.
Where I disagree with you is that "Western Civilization," i.e. European origin, is too broad of a concept for the basis of nationhood, or that the conception of that nation truly excluded most Europeans. In 1790 Congress restricted naturalization to white people, not to "English and Dutch and Scottish Protestant liberals" or "Anglo-Saxons." Similar naturalization restrictions continued until well within living memory--even when the laws favored Northwestern Europeans after 1924, the other allowed groups were still Europeans, even if Southern and Eastern Europeans were considered less desirable Europeans. Non-Westerners were not allowed at all! Here's how the Supreme Court thought of the question in 1923 when debating the naturalization of an Indian man:
In the US, there was a historically-recognized kinship between the many different types of people who made up "Western Civilization," and rather than being too broad, this concept was successfully used to create nationhood.
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