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Putting aside the practicalities of such a plan, how many whites even want one? I suspect the vast majority of whites are in the same category as me: we don't like racism against whites being normalised in the media and in the general culture but we still prefer to live in societies that are classically liberal, with strong rights given to individuals above "collective identities" as the foundation.
It seems to me that most white nationalists simply live in a false, idealised world where all problems would dissipate if there was racial homogeneity. Europe's history prior to WWII was full of internecine warfare and petty tribalism. There is no reason such a "white state" wouldn't eventually fall prey to the same kinds of internal forces even if it became a big success on its own terms (high fertility, strong economy, xenophobic immigration policies).
Ethnogenesis is a constant historical process. "White" identity itself is mostly an answer to racial diversity. In the absence of it, other forms of separatism could well form. What was Southern identity during the 1800s in America? You don't even need a separate language or ethnicity for secessionism! Why do these white nationalists believe that their fantasy state would be any different?
And this all ignores that "white identity" is mostly an overseas Anglosphere thing. In France, Germany or Finland the natives don't perceive themselves as white but rather simply according to ethnicity. So even talking of a broader Western whiteness is a stretch to me.
I think what's really going on here is that the founding Anglos and the later European ethnicities who went to the US, Canada and Australia became victims of their own success in a way. They succeeded far more than anyone could have possibly imagined. They've built the greatest societies on Earth and with English being the lingua franca of ambitious third world elites, it was simply never possible to remain closed. Given that the US can pick the best and the brightest out of 8 billion people, its domestic elites would never choose any other system. They'd be idiots to do so, as being the world's primary human capital magnet accrues compounding advantages over time that are simply irresistible and possibly even insurmountable, as we see now with China's stagnation.
I find these separatist fantasies to be utterly devoid of any contact with reality.
I am with you, I fail to understand what white identity even means, what could this group of people possibly have in common culturally.
The reality of the modern world is that it's cut a lot of people adrift from feeling rooted, although with history this was often the case also. Religion, nationality filled the void and created a sense of identity, but they too have fallen away. Modernism together with liberalism created a secular kind of identity that reached its zenith with neoliberalism and the end of history ideas, but that too has fallen by the wayside. We forgot that the conditions of a liberal society are downstream of culture and so fell into the current strand of progressive authoritarianism or neo-Marxism.
The question, if you have not already committed to some ethno-nationalist tribalism, is what next. Here are the parameters as I see it:
We have lost religion but secularism could never take its place so we have religiosity appearing as cult like ideologies.
We have philosophical relativism combined with postmodernism expressed as a superficial liberalism run amok. No, not everyone's thinking is equal - we can privilege good thinking over poor thinking and we desperately need to.
We need to reintroduce economics into discourse so we can agree across racial lines and make race less salient. Aren't a lot of poor whites just victims of changing economics and policy?
We need to stop believing simplistic narratives while at the same time being able to talk freely about things without being projected on for taboo topics. We should be able to critique aspects of different cultures without race necessarily coming into it.
We're actually in an exciting time, on the cusp of changes. It's no surprise religion is being talked about as part of the solution, even as less people profess belief in traditional religions. The secular, materialist, modernist frame has been too flat, it has run its course. This of course doesn't mean we abandon it's best elements and turn ourselves into a postmodern mush, we desperately need a scientific mindset, but it does mean we need to look beyond.
Also, I think there is a growing appreciation for elements of conservatism and self-sovereignty. Culture exists for a reason and we can't just cut it out of whole cloth - there are actually things worth preserving. We need to challenge decadent thinking and reorient to families and child development rather than how to construct a world that entertains rootless adults.
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Whether you consider these advantages at all depends on your metric of success. If you value something else more than material economic gain or technological development, then all the GDP growth in the world is not going to sway you. I wouldn't swap out my family members for people who were smarter and more productive if I were given the choice; for many people the same goes for their countrymen.
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I find myself sort of leaning in a separatist direction less out of solidarity, and more out of self defense. And I’m pretty sure I’m not exactly alone here. It’s not about animosity, or superiority, it’s just simply that I feel more often than not, things I hold important are being torn up, people very much like me are being held out of good opportunities they’ve earned because the Imperium has decided that people like me and mine need not apply. I’m not asking for anything else, just leave us alone.
As to what the elites want, sure for a time that’s a good thing. But there are problems. First, as other nations catch up, both economically and educationally, that pool of highly competitive desirable immigrants will dry up. Once that happens, the fact that we’ve mostly cannibalized out education system and have been giving scholarships to barely literate humanities majors might well start to matter. Second, those we import are not culturally like us. Who is a Chinese immigrant most loyal to? Or an Indian? Or whoever? Their culture is from their homeland, their desires are about their own country, family, their values and so on.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? I'm a white guy from a rural background, went to non-elite state universities, and simply have not experienced a sense that I'm missing out on good opportunities. I'm aware that there is statistical discrimination, but the opportunities for capable people in the United States are so many that this just hasn't been a meaningful problem.
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We seem to be the only ones who actually appreciate this. You say this as if to mean, since Ethnogenesis is always happening there's no major concern with intelligently directing it, as if Ethnogenesis were just the weather and we have to live with it or something. That couldn't be more wrong, White Identity should be embraced precisely because ethnogenesis is a constant historical process and the outcomes of rejecting the reality of a European racial concept are catastrophic precisely for that reason.
Has a political movement focused on encouraging ethnogenesis ever had a good outcome? I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.
I also mean more than the politics of historical fascism (though those have always had disastrous outcomes). Maybe European nations in the 19th century, in a kind of turning peasants into Frenchmen kind of way? Perhaps, but that was a gradual process taking centuries and itself caused plenty of disasters. Many Eastern European nations would have had a better 20th century if the pursuit of minor identities hadn't torn apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the most common outcome is for ethnogenic movements to just fizzle out: see pan-Slavism.
This supposes that the development of ethnic identities in the first place was an organic process, when in most cases it was a top-down government policy that forcibly assimilated minority groups through a combination of public schooling, historical revisionism, and state propaganda. Forming separate national identities is not the inevitable result of linguistic, religious, or cultural differences, otherwise the Middle East, China, and India would have ended up looking exactly like Europe. The relative youth of these identities is why there aren't many examples of shoring them up yet.
As to whether ethnogenesis has had good outcomes in the past, the question is good for whom? I would say the Turks have done well for themselves, successfully transitioning from being the head of a pan-Islamic empire into a nation-state with a strong identity and relatively good economic development relative to its neighbors, but that success came at the cost of millions of dead Armenians and Greeks. If places like India and Nigeria succeed in melding their disparate inhabitants into united ethnicities, that would in the long run eliminate most of the sectarian tensions that hold countries like them back, but would in the short run actively inflame them.
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