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In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
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Notes -
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
This quote came to mind when you asked what is white Nationalism.
A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”
White People - are those who can keep it. Propagate self-governance. Live as free people in a functional complex society
Non-white - are the people who can not self-govern or contribute to its existence.
In the American context which uses an expanding term of whiteness it’s basically anyone who can replicate and reproduce the ideals expressed in the founding of the nation.
That is still really vague. I am talking about people who want to restrict immigration based on race. What would that actually mean? Once they can answer that, we can talk about whether that actually makes sense, whether it could work, how it would be done, and whether there are better ways of achieving those goals. White nationalists don't seem to want to do any of those things. But they are decisions they would eventually have to make.
It's not that "How would you decide who is white" would never need to be settled, but it's often used as a gotcha in the exact same way as when trans advocates try to nail their opponents down to a precise fully biological definition of gender and then make a big deal of it when they struggle to handle all the edge cases with a single definition.
The specific way they "make a big deal of it" is to act as if these terminological questions need to be dealt with at the outset, otherwise all subsequent discussion must necessarily be confused. But they fail to consider why their opponents might see their own priorities differently. White identitarianism has gained traction online because of the way whites have been treated. Despite anti-whites probably being more likely than most to deny that there could be any definition of the white race, they certainly see no problem with talking about white people as a monolith.
This where the bad faith accusations are coming from. When a group of people is being attacked, most would agree it's in their interest to organize to defend themselves. Explicit anti-whites can be forgiven for trying to shut this down by muddying the waters on whiteness; why wouldn't they want an enemy that they can organize against but that is epistemically incapable of organizing against them?
More annoying are the centrists who do the same thing: "How can you expect people to give a sympathetic hearing to white nationalism if you can't even define one of the two words in that moniker?" The answer is that it's a peripheral question that need only be answered once white nationalism is closer to the levers of power. It's very easy to classify most Americans or Europeans as white or non-white; that's enough for now. There are factions that might prefer to include, e.g., Armenians, and there are other factions that might prefer to exclude them, and so on for other populations of coarser or finer granularity. White nationalists are aware that nature only provides us with racial clusters connected by gradients, not sharp, one-dimensional boundaries. It's simply unreasonable to demand that a single definition spontaneously coalesce from out of their reasonable diversity of internet opinions. Not to mention that any one definition would look silly and arbitrary to outsiders for the same reasons that white nationalists themselves can't agree on a definition.
That will change if and when one of the factions gains the political edge over the others. Even the hardest of the hard right generally fall in line behind Trump, whatever their personal disagreements with him, because he is doing the most (so they believe) to advance their causes. Imagine how ecstatic they would be if a US president deported all recently arrived, unmarried, non-white immigrants, severely clamped down on immigration, reasserted the accomplishments of white people in the teaching of American history, curtailed the anti-white animus in media and academia, etc. Contrary to the "But what even is white?" people's demands, they wouldn't really care whether some Istanbul satellite made the cut. It's an edge case, it belongs on the edge.
Once WNs have a power gradient to follow, then will be the time to start hardening feelings into policies, a process that will be constrained by whatever alliances and compromises make sense to those people, in those positions, with those connections, at that time. It's understandable that internet randos who know the impotence and arbitrariness of their own opinions are not willing to make themselves the spokespeople of the entire movement.
Counterpoint: I'm acquainted with some far-right folks (though I'm sure Hlynka would have disagreed with that classification) who have been consistently Trump-skeptical-to-Trump-hostile since 2016, though not in the "never-Trumper Republican" way. Some even argue that his victory in 2016 was a product of foreign election-tampering and he was a puppet taking orders from overseas; the whole "Russian collusion" narrative… except for the difference of it not being Moscow pulling his strings, but Jerusalem. That the election this November is "just a show," and there's no meaningful difference between Trump and Biden because they're both "ZOG puppets." (And that elections will remain meaningless until we have a party and a candidate who understands that the only question that matters is "the JQ" and says so.)
Then there was also one guy who argues that all secular governments are servants of Satan (citing Matthew 4:8-9), and that we need a totalizing Christian theocracy; which, in the "correct" understanding of Matthew 22:21 — that only he holds, and everyone else gets wrong — is what Jesus actually called for.
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