Libertarianism, Cosmopolitanism, & Indo-European Tradition, Part 1

                       By Gregoire Canlorbe

       

Warning: This article lies on a metapolitical and ideal level, and not on a programmatic and political level.

The obsession of liberals (libertarians, either “classical liberals” or “anarcho-capitalists”) with condemning economic or Cultural Marxism is a dead end. Saving Western civilization requires the wisdom to identify, and the courage to name, the true contemporary enemy of the West: cosmopolitanism. Cultural Marxism is a sluggish expression, which may at best designate Gramsci’s doctrine that Marxists must, before attempting the Revolution, achieve cultural hegemony; as for economic Marxism, which is only a way of designating Communism and planning, it subsists at the margins. Cosmopolitanism is the ideology promoted by the “global superclass,” according to the expression popularized (if not initiated) by Samuel Huntington: the world superclass consists of a transnational network of uprooted and denationalized people, whose gestation dates back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century and whose constitution accelerated with the fall of the Soviet bloc. This article aims to elucidate the conceptual relations between liberalism (libertarianism) and cosmopolitanism, and will outline the contours of a new variety of liberalism: a liberalism simultaneously directed against bourgeois nationalism and against cosmopolitanism.

Definition of cosmopolitism

By cosmopolitan ideology, one must understand the ideology that rejects humanity divided into nations. As such, cosmopolitanism condemns the particular mode of organization that characterizes a nation, which confers on a group of individuals the identity and unity of a nation. That mode of organization is the following: a relative genetic homogeneity, as well as cultural; a chain of social and juridical ranks that goes back to a sovereign political authority (i.e., the supreme authority within the government); and a territory that is covered by, and which limits, this hierarchical and homogeneous organization. Cosmopolitanism attacks the sense of territory, and therefore borders, by forbidding governments to defend nations against indiscriminate free trade or free immigration. It also attacks the juridico-political hierarchy of a nation in advocating the sole income and occupation inequalities, or in defending a world government. Finally, cosmopolitanism condemns the genetic and cultural differences between nations: not content with advocating the relativism of values within each nation – i.e., the abolition of moral boundaries enacted within them – it praises the leveling of races and cultures.

It is a mistake to believe that the cosmopolitan elite cultivates the ideal of a humanity reduced to its animality. The ideology of the world superclass abhors, very precisely, these fundamental instincts of human nature that are territorialism the will to domination, identity and adventure, which are so many distinct expressions of the aggressiveness coded in our genome. The ideal that cosmopolitanism cultivates is actually that of a humanity in which the instincts of territory and identity, and thus the attachment to frontiers, are no longer expressed; and of a humanity in which the instincts of adventure and domination, and thus the taste for competition and war, are no longer expressed. A humanity deprived of its national and cultural rooting – but also, more fundamentally, of its biological rooting – is the horizon of cosmopolitan ideology. In the field of values and moral boundaries, let us point out that the cosmopolitanism of the world superclass diverges from the pur et durcosmopolitanism, in that the ideology of the world superclass counterbalances the call to ignore moral boundaries (on behalf of individual emancipation) with the concern for preserving and establishing typically bourgeois values.

Although the concept of “cosmopolitanism” was brandished for the first time by the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, it is far from being evident that Diogenes (and in his wake, the Stoic philosophers) understood cosmopolitanism in its current sense of an ideology preaching the relativism of values and the leveling of races and nations. It may well be that cosmopolitanism in its Classical sense was only the philosophy that everyone belongs – on a moral and bio-cultural level – to a given nation, and in a “spiritual” sense belongs to all of humanity as well: such a conception does not mean the rejection of nations. Be that as it may, what will concern us here will be cosmopolitanism as it is understood (and set up) by the world superclass; and it will be liberalism envisaged in its relation to the cosmopolitanism of the world superclass: a cosmopolitanism that advocates bio-cultural leveling and a certain moral relativism, but which remains attached to these properly bourgeois values that are the hegemony of economy, contempt for virility, the materialist approach to reality, and puritanical or feminist moralism.

The three faces of the equalitarian utopia

For the overwhelming majority of liberals, they (be they academics or simply followers of the liberal philosophy) refrain from denouncing cosmopolitanism and envision Marxism as the only enemy to fight. What is more, they indulge in cosmopolitanism at various levels, whether or not they use the term cosmopolitanism; and whether that ideological stance is conscious on their part or is so natural that it goes unnoticed in their own eyes. Is that situation the sign that liberalism is culminating as cosmopolitanism: in other words, that cosmopolitanism constitutes the logical outcome of liberalism; and that the endorsement of cosmopolitanism among liberals is, therefore, neither accidental nor contingent (but responds to a conceptual necessity)?

Before we answer, it is not useless to highlight the kinship of liberalism, socialism, and cosmopolitanism. Those three ideologies (or philosophies) are ultimately the three distinct manifestations of the same egalitarian ideal. Indeed, liberals, socialists, and cosmopolitans are enemy brothers, animated by a common passion for equality; even though it is a faith, an ideal, that they embody in three distinct ways: universality of law for liberals, equality of income for socialists, and the leveling of races and nations for cosmopolitans. Let us add that liberalism, socialism, and cosmopolitanism – as they have unfolded since the French Revolution – also converge in their common adherence to the hegemony of economy in the scale of values. Such hegemony is not a wishful vow on the part of egalitarian ideals: as rank inequalities were dissipating (in accordance with the liberal ideal of equality in law), economics has gradually lifted itself (since the Revolution of 1789) to the summit of Western values. By the same token, the welfare state has gained ground (in accordance with the socialist ideal of economic equality), and cosmopolitanism itself has finally contaminated the intra-national mores and relations between nations.

Let us be clear about what makes the singularity of each of the three heads of the equalitarian hydra. The universality of law – or the equality of human beings with regard to the rules of law that must apply to them – serves as the fundamental value of liberalism. The essential propositions of that philosophy always boil down to some justification or affirmation of the value of equality, understood in its legal sense as equal freedom for all equal escape from all coercion (in their lives and in terms of the goods they can acquire). For socialism, it is equality in an economic sense – income equality and central planning – which serves as a fundamental value; and for cosmopolitanism, it is equality taken in a biological, cultural, and “communitarian” sense: the equality of men in the sense of their biological and cultural lack of differentiation, and in the sense of their not belonging to any other collective than humanity. That everyone should be culturally and racially identical, that no one should be a member of a nation within humanity, that everyone should be a member of humanity considered as a collective in its own right (and that one should be a member of that collective only), that the individual should be released from the values and moral boundaries that his affiliation to one or another nation assigns to him, and that he should everything which “thwarts” and separates individuals should be removed: this is the egalitarian creed of cosmopolitanism.

From classical liberalism to anarcho-capitalist cosmopolitanism

In its chemically pure form, so to speak, liberalism merges with an anarchism that respects private property – and, in particular, the private ownership of the means of production. Knowing whether the “truth” of a doctrine lies in the extremist, radical branch of that doctrine or in its moderate, “pragmatic” branch is an insoluble problem: it is a matter of arbitrary consideration, of “subjective preference,” rather than a means to identify the authentic meaning of a doctrine with what its radical or moderate branches affirm. Therefore, it would be futile that we ask whether anarcho-capitalist liberalism is “truer” or more “authentic” than so-called classical liberalism. But it is not vain to determine whether integral liberalism, in addition of being anarchist, is also a cosmopolitanism (out of logical and conceptual necessity). We will see that anarcho-capitalism only serves to exacerbate the cosmopolitanism already present in classical liberalism.

The classical liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the Mill father and son, Robert Torrens, Frederic Bastiat, Yves Guyot, Ludwig von Mises, or Friedrich August von Hayek, not only affirm its attachment to equality in law, or universality in the rules of law, but promotes an extended division of labor, and praises the entrepreneur as the one who coordinates the division of labor (on the basis of his anticipation of the fluctuations in demand), spurring the allocation of factors in anticipation and in the direction of long-term equilibrium (where capital is allocated in such a way that entrepreneurial decisions have correctly anticipated the priorities now displayed by the demand for consumption or investment). Anarcho-capitalism lies in the vein of classical liberalism, except that it rejects the “minimal state” promoted by classical liberals; and calls for privatizing (and opening up to competition) the regal functions, to put an end to the state’s legal monopoly on the use of force to sanction the rule of law.

The greatness of classical liberalism (that culminates in anarcho-capitalism) lies in its double demonstration of the superior productivity of the extended division of labor, and of the need for the free market – and a fortiori the free market for capital goods, in the absence of which there can be no anticipation and no calculation of the profitability of allocation decisions – to coordinate the division of labor in the direction and in anticipation of the optimal satisfaction of the demands for consumption and investment. The mediocrity of classical liberalism lies in its contempt for the warlike spirit, and in its pacifist ideal, which degrades human nature, given that it is the case – as Hegel knew so well – that “the movement of the winds preserves the waters of the lakes from the danger of putrefaction, which would plunge them into a lasting calm, as would do for the peoples a lasting peace and a fortiori a perpetual peace.” Let us note that the pacifism of classical liberalism has remained wishful thinking to this day; and that the West after the Revolution of 1789 did not see the end of war, but only of the warrior spirit: we will return to this subject later.

Anarcho-capitalists, as much as classical liberals, by the very necessity of their doctrine indulge in cosmopolitanism. While classical liberalism merges with a relative cosmopolitanism, anarcho-capitalism merges with a more pronounced cosmopolitanism. While classical liberalism affirms the existence of nations, and nonetheless promotes the indiscriminate opening of borders to goods and migrants (in the name of the ideal of a division of labor whose scope transcends political boundaries), anarcho-capitalism denies or condemns the existence of nations themselves. The reason for that animosity lies in the fact that anarcho-capitalism draws all the implications of equality in law, which is tantamount to saying that it aspires to an equality in law that is perfect, “die-hard.”

Classical liberalism, as it accepts the state, accepts a first infringement of equality in law: officials and taxpayers, indeed, do not see themselves judged by the same rules of law (in the sense that the former are exceptionally empowered to live on coercion and to enjoy privileges such as, for example, the more extended right to strike, very advantageous pensions and health care mutuals, or guaranteed employment). However, classical liberalism does not only accept the state, it accepts the state within a national framework: it accepts the state as it covers the territory of a given nation, federated by a relative cultural and genetic homogeneity; in spite of notable exceptions, including that of Mises, classical liberalism does not promote the disappearance of national states in favor of a world state. As such, in addition of accepting the inequality in law between civil servants and taxpayers, classical liberalism accepts the inequality in law between domestic residents and foreigners. Anarcho-capitalism does not even want those two infringements of equality in law: the only inequalities that it considers legitimate are the inequalities of income and profession, any inequality in law becoming ipso facto guilty in his eyes – including the distinction between the official and the taxpayer, and that between the national citizen and the foreigner.

Concerning the relative cosmopolitanism that characterizes classical liberalism, and the adherence to a world government that makes the originality of Ludwig von Mises within classical liberalism, this passage from his treatise Liberalism is quite clear:

The metaphysical theory of the state declares – approaching, in this respect, the vanity and presumption of the absolute monarchs – that each individual state is sovereign, i.e., that it represents the last and highest court of appeals. But, for the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the state. In his eyes, whatever significance national boundaries have is only incidental and subordinate. His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind. The starting-point of his entire political philosophy is the conviction that the division of labor is international and not merely national. He realizes from the very first that it is not sufficient to establish peace within each country, that it is much more important that all nations live at peace with one another. The liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law, and that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs of each country are charged with the maintenance of peace within its own territory.

Anarcho-capitalism condemns the distinction between the official and the taxpayer, as well as the distinction between the national citizen and the foreigner. Without being integrally cosmopolitan (and favorable to moral relativism or bio-cultural leveling), anarcho-capitalist cosmopolitanism is therefore a much more assertive, much more radical cosmopolitanism than is classical-liberal cosmopolitanism. In practice, one cannot but notice that there exists – in addition to those cosmopolitan tendencies that flow from a conceptual necessity – a very strong propensity of anarcho-capitalists to deny the existence of aggressive instincts, as well as that of races and cultures; and to condone, or even encourage, cultural leveling and miscegenation. This is accomplished on the grounds that only “individuals” would thus exist – i.e., individuals who are not only born tabula rasa and undifferentiated, but who have no other social link than the division of labor and trade. National genetic and cultural links are particularly denied. Such an approach deserves, in our opinion, the qualifier of “liberal Lysenkoism” [“libertarian Lysenkoism]; it is found among anarcho-capitalist, but also hybrid liberals: those who rally to the minimal state (or minarchy) of classical liberalism are nevertheless seduced – like anarcho-capitalists – by the ideal of racial and cultural leveling.

From the national-liberalism of 1789 to pseudo-nationalist anarcho-capitalism

One can conceive of “chemically pure,” radical liberalism as an egalitarianism which recognizes as legitimate only economic inequalities: income and occupation inequalities. Some anarcho-capitalists, however, claim to be defending the nation and developing a system that reconciles the preservation of nations with the universality of law: such is the case with Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, or Bertrand Lemennicier. We will see that these claims are invalid, and that such a version of anarcho-capitalism is only pseudo-nationalism. Nevertheless, there is indeed a liberalism that reconciles the ideal of the nation and the rejection of all forms of cosmopolitanism with equality before the law, or the universality of the law; and that liberalism is none other than that which inspired the Revolution of 1789 and the posterior European nationalisms.

We have seen that classical liberalism affirms the existence of nations and advocates that they cultivate pacifism and free trade, rejecting warmongering for the benefit not only of peace, but for an unlimited division of labor that extends beyond the frontiers; where men and capital circulate without the slightest restriction. The national-liberalism (or nationalist liberalism) of 1789, which served as the matrix for the various European nationalisms of the nineteenth century, differs from classical liberalism on the question of free trade and free immigration: it does not intend – unlike classical liberalism – to open borders to goods and people without discrimination. It is also distinguishable from classical liberalism on the question of pacifism: Napoleonic imperialism and the conflict of 1914-1918 constitute the purple epiphany of the warmongering inherent in bourgeois nationalism.

The national liberalism of 1789 combined the ideal of free enterprise with that of a perfectly unified nation, i.e., deprived of its intermediary bodies and of its rank inequalities. It intends to exacerbate the national sentiment so that the feeling of belonging to a nation henceforth arouses greater pride than that of belonging to some caste or class within that nation; it also attempts to erode the traditional status inequalities so that the nation will only know inequalities in terms of income and profession, and that individuals are reduced to mere cogs in the division of labor. Besides this, the national-liberalism of 1789 promotes a greater cultural homogenization: for example, in combating regional dialects and in imposing the use of a single “national language,” it can even promote the unification (into a single nation) of a geographical area that is composed of culturally and genetically related nations. Italy and Germany offer us two eminent examples of such unification.

On all those points, apart from forced unification and cultural homogenization, the national-liberalism of 1789 convergences perfectly with classical liberalism. Their model of the nation is rigorously the same: namely, that of a bourgeois nation. The disagreement comesover the questions of free trade, free immigration, and pacifism. As Vilfredo Pareto invites us to do, it is always worthwhile to distinguish between the “residue” and the “derivation,” the feelings that an ideology expresses and the supposedly logico-experimental varnish that covers them (often in disguising them). In fact, the national-liberalism of 1789, which claims to adhere to equality before the law, legitimizes a society that does not ignore inequality before the law, but only intermediate bodies (between the government and the individual); and where inequality before the law takes such a form that the dominant class, juridically and politically, becomes henceforth the bourgeoisie by virtue of the erasure of the intermediate inequalities in rank in favor of solely economic inequalities. The national-liberalism of 1789, like classical liberalism and even anarcho-capitalism, proposes to defend the bourgeois order and the commercial society under the guise of a mysticism of equality.

A version of anarcho-capitalism exists, which I have already referred to as pseudo-nationalist, which claims to be a liberalism that claims to preserve nations. Its adherents are, in truth, just as deluded on that question as those among the anarcho-capitalists who openly claim to reject the nation. The anarcho-capitalism à la Hoppe conceives, in more or less explicit terms, of the nation as an association based on property rights, and on the basis of property rights only. In other words, it envisions the nation as a vast ownership cooperative on which the state would be grafted ad hoc. The sympathies of those who adhere to the national-liberalism of 1789 for this variant of anarcho-capitalism stems from the condemnation of free immigration that has been formulated by the thinkers of Hoppe’s school. While they support free trade and the indiscriminate opening of national borders for the exchange of goods, they claim that the indiscriminate opening of those same borders to people violates property rights.

The inanity of such a conception of the nation cannot be overestimated. In the real world, national boundaries are not enshrined by property owners, but by governments. The nation is no more a fantasy exploited by governments to legitimize their authority over a given territory than it is an association of private owners. Once we get beyond the anarcho-capitalist chimeras, it is possible to apprehend the nation for what it is: a space federated by a given pecking order, and thus a certain juridico-political order; and by a territorial instinct which is expressed as much among the owners “at the bottom of the social ladder” as among those – bourgeois or aristocrats – who compose the ruling class and the state administration. It is also expressed in a relative genetic homogeneity, as well as that of culture: a common worldview, a certain canvas of memes. In fine, wanting to rebuild nations on the basis of property rights constitutes a modality of cosmopolitanism.

For an introduction to the theory of pecking orders, one may consult Howard Bloom’s interview with the Gatestone Institute:

Research on pecking orders – known technically as dominance hierarchies – has gone on now for roughly a hundred years. Schjelderup‑Ebbe, the naturalist who observed this “dominance hierarchy” in a Norwegian farmyard, called it the key to despotism. Schjelderup-Ebbe had discovered that in the world of chickens there is a social hierarchy, a division into aristocrats and commoners – a lower, middle and upper class. Pecking orders also exist among men, monkeys, lobsters, and lizards. And the struggle for position in a pecking order is not re­stricted to individuals. It also hits social groups.

Bloom’s interview is also interesting as an introduction to meme theory:

As genes are to the individual organism, so memes are to the social organism, or superorganism, pulling together millions of individu­als into a collective creature of awesome size. Memes stretch their tendrils through the fabric of each human brain, driving us to coagulate in the cooperative masses of family, tribe and nation. . . . In law, politics, and economics, individualism is a personal credo of great importance. I, for one, am a passionate believer in free speech, democracy, and capitalism. But to scientists, the obsession to place emphasis on the individual has been a chimera leading them down a dead‑end path. History, either natural or human, has never been the sole province of the selfish individual, essentially preoccupied with preserving his genes. For history is the playfield of the superorganism – and of its recent step-child, the meme.

Concerning the argument that a free immigration policy is incompatible with respect for property rights, and therefore incompatible with anarcho-capitalism, that argument is merely a rhetorical trick, a “derivation,” than a logico-experimental form of reasoning. Indeed, it implicitly assumes that the nation constitutes a club or cooperative ownership, where the decision to authorize (or refuse) the entry of migrants is made by the owners (or by a gathering of members of the club). Yet that is a manifestly false conception of the nation (which is no more a club than it is a cooperative); and on the basis of such a premise, one could just as easily argue that free trade violates property rights, and therefore anarcho-capitalism, on the grounds that a policy opening up the nation’s frontiers to goods denies the right of the owners to decide which goods are allowed to cross the boundaries of their properties.

Free immigration and free trade must be limited, not in the name of anarcho-capitalism, but in the name of rejecting the cosmopolitanism inherent in classical liberalism and in all forms of anarcho-capitalism. Liberalism must be counterbalanced, limited by “civilizational” and geopolitical considerations: in this respect, it should be reminded that the invasion of Western nations by cosmopolitanism is only the culmination of a process of subversion which began with the abandonment of the warrior-based and sacerdotal culture, and with the advent of the commercial (or bourgeois) society. Classical liberalism has been involved in the march of cosmopolitanism from the beginning, in the sense that it has accompanied free trade and free immigration; for its part, the national-liberalism of 1789 has been involved in the march of the commercial society (without either classical liberalism nor anarcho-capitalism coming to intellectually oppose bourgeois society, or to defend the Indo-European tradition).

The Conservatives of Reflection

                       Posted by Cologero

At one time, there was no such political movement similar to the “right”, because what is now called the “right”, properly understood, was the natural organization of traditional societies. It was only the spirit of rebellion, which has marked all recent Western history, that created this dichotomy between the so-called left and right.  Note that by this standard there is really nothing of the “right” remaining in the West and it should not be confused with contemporary “conservative” movements.

Historically, the terms derived from the two opposing forces resulting from the French revolution. That led to two distinct, but related, currents of conservative thought. One, which we have focused on, derives from the continental stream beginning with Joseph de Maistre and continuing with Bonald, Louis Veuillot, Donoso Cortes, and many similar critics of liberalism and revolution.

The other current, almost exclusively in English, derives from Edmund Burke; this current has been amply documented in the works of Russell Kirk, particularly in The Conservative Mind. This current is neglected and nearly forgotten; it certainly has no voice in the public square. Instead, in recent times, new currents have arisen, with little or no connection to these two primary currents. Recognizing this, they are ugly prefixes like “neo”, “new”, or “alternative”. Such terms give me agitasince the prefix simply sounds like “non” to my mind. If you are heading in the right direction, then any innovations or novelties must necessarily be in another direction. If not, they are superfluous

Now I can understand that changing historical circumstances may require new presentations, given that the past cannot repeat itself. However, I believe that is not what is going on, since these novelties seem to embrace the mentality of the modern world that they claim to oppose. Far from being anti-intellectual, the right is the true intellect. Hence, in a schematic way with minimal explanation, I will list its ways of thinking and understanding. Perhaps someone can demonstrate that these novelties accept all these principle, and thus are not novelties at all. Otherwise, it will be helpful to point out their deviations. It is important to stay on the level of principles rather than specific issues; for to say that a “conservative” issue is this or that is often wrong unless there is a reason behind it.

Three principles of Knowledge

Transcendence: conformance of the mind to transcendent ideas

Reality: conformance of the mind to the world

Integrity: conformance of the interior man to the exterior man in his life, speech, and actions

The modern mind rejects at least the first two principles. For it, there are no transcendent ideas in the Mind of God; rather ideas are concepts formed in man’s mind. Since Kant, the external world is held to be unknowable in itself; rather we form ideas about it either through science or ideologies.

Order and Chaos

There are two ways to relate these notions. The first is traditional, the second is modern, and is the logical consequence of scientism and atheism.

Order, or Logos, is the essential aspect, chaos is the accident

Chaos is the essential aspect, and order is an accident

Ideology: the Opposite of Knowledge

In rejecting the knowledge of reality, the modern mind is prone to ideology. That is, since there is nothing real that it must conform to, it is free to create grandiose schemes. There is really no common ground for discussion between the two worldviews. It seems to me that the “new” rights are ideological. For example, there are the incessant debates about religion, as though one could pick and choose a religion based on how well it conforms to their ideology. Instead, political thought must follow spiritual reality, not the other way around.

Conservative Premises

In the Introduction to The Portable Conservative Reader, Russell Kirk expounds on six conservative premises that he derives from Edmund Burke. These are not necessarily metaphysical principles but rather prudential principles intended to guide practical politics. Hence, their applicability will vary for different circumstances.

Transcendent Moral Order There is always a “lawgiver”, with divine sanction in a traditional society. In the West, that has taken the form of natural law.

Social continuity The order of society is the product of a “long and painful social experience, the results of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice.” This is not to say that change is not necessary, but it needs to be gradual.

Prescription This is adherence to the “wisdom of our ancestors”. The first tactic of the revolutionary is always to attack the ancestors. The new rightists, in their constant attack on the foundations of Western civilization, reveal themselves as revolutionaries.

Prudence Plato and Burke agree that prudence is the chief virtue of the statesman. The long run consequences of a policy must be taken into account, rather than temporary advantage or popularity.

Variety Conservatives “feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems.” True and healthy diversity rests of many sorts of inequality.

Imperfectibility “Human nature suffers irremediably from certain faults.” This is the fundamental axiom of the science of man. The corollary is that “no perfect social order ever can be created.” All schemes that depend on men acting intelligently and with good will in all circumstances will fail. A fortiori, any system that requires the appearance of a “new man” will fail miserably.

Three Types of Conservatives

Walter Bagehot distinguishes three types of conservatives.

The Conservatives of Enjoyment

The Conservatives of Order

The Conservatives of Reflection

The conservatives of enjoyment like the “old ways” for their own sake. Hence, they prefer ancestral customs in manners, dress, religion, thought, and so on. For this they need no intellectual conviction to justify that preference. Much is taken on “animal faith”, supported by established and ancient traditions. Their primary motivation is loyalty.

The conservatives of order are the petite bourgeoisie who want to hold onto their property, land, family, etc. Thus they support policies that will protect their holdings and wealth, as well as “law and order”. They are often mocked, but yet they form the bedrock of a society. Their primary motivation is fear.

The conservatives of reflection know the reasons for loyalty, order, etc., in short, the principles mentioned above. In Bagehot’s time, he claimed there were too few of them and little has changed since then. The first two types of conservatives are on the soapbox and their lack of intellectual sophistication makes them easy targets for the forces of revolution.

So what have the novelties brought us? They reject the “old ways” and are not loyal to our ancestors, or else they count as ancestors only those from some remote, unknowable, and imaginary antiquity. In actuality, they prefer the ways, mores, and beliefs of the modern world and have often admitted it. The task of the new conservatives of reflection is to recover those ideas and restated them for modern ears.

The Original Congressional Debate On Birthright Citizenship

                             By A. Graham

        

Leftists are fond of mocking conservative defenders of the Constitution, but they mysteriously morph into strict constructionists whenever anything threatens to overturn a law that suits their interests. Such is the case with the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The same people who have advocated discarding the Second Amendment altogether are now rallying around the sacred infallibility of constitutional law regarding birthright citizenship.

Indeed, cases like this point to the importance of taking historical context into account. The framers of the Constitution and the men who followed in their footsteps were highly intelligent, but few of them could have foreseen what America would become. They took it for granted that America was a white country and would remain so in the future.

The minutes of the 1866 congressional debate over the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment make for interesting reading. The clause is proposed by Senator Jacob Howard, who adds that “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers” are excluded from it as dictated by the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”[1]

The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was added to ensure that the children of those with dual loyalties (such as diplomats) would not become citizens under the new amendment. Senator Lyman Trumbull states: “What do we mean by ‘subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?’ Not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means.”[2] The concept of birthright citizenship is derived from English Common Law, under which a person owed allegiance to the ruler within whose kingdom he was born. Children born within a kingdom other than that to which their parents owed allegiance were excluded from this law and were not regarded as subjects of the ruler of that kingdom.

The Supreme Court stated in the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excluded “children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign states born within the United States.” This was dismissed as an obiter dictum in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), but it was the prevailing interpretation up to that point. This was again confirmed in Elk v. Wilkins (1884), in which the Court decided that an Indian who had severed his tribal ties was nonetheless not a citizen due to the fact that he owed allegiance to his tribe at the time of his birth.

Most of the debate itself revolves around whether Indians are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. The senators disagree on whether Howard’s clause automatically disqualifies Indians by virtue of the fact that they belong to their own autonomous tribal nations, but they all agree that birthright citizenship should not apply to Indians.

Birthright citizenship, then, does not lawfully extend to American-born children of non-citizens and illegal aliens whose ultimate loyalty lies with another nation.

Still, it is noteworthy that this clause was powerless to prevent the gradual displacement of white Americans due to mass immigration. The semantic ambiguity of Howard’s clause and subsequent remark was easily exploited. Howard and the other senators probably did not think the issue was sufficiently grave as to warrant additional provisions.

There was one senator who was far-sighted enough to anticipate the potential long-term consequences of this. In the debate, a certain Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania urges Howard to articulate a more precise definition of who is a citizen of the United States and argues that non-whites should be explicitly excluded from the clause in order to guard against demographic invasion.

Another senator, John Conness of California, dismisses Cowan’s concerns and replies that there are not many non-white foreigners in the US and that they (mainly Chinese at the time) will eventually return to their country of origin. The issue is then settled. The senators continue to discuss the Indian question and do not address Cowan’s point. It is an instructive exchange and shows that the drafters of the amendment did not at all anticipate how history would unfold.

Here are excerpts from Cowan’s floor statement:

The honorable Senator from Michigan has given this subject, I have no doubt, a good deal of attention, and I am really desirous to have a legal definition of “citizenship of the United States.” What does it mean? What is its length and breadth? I would be glad if the honorable Senator in good earnest would favor us with some such definition. Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? Is the child of a Gypsy born in Pennsylvania a citizen? Have they any more rights than a sojourner in the United States? If a traveler comes here from Ethiopia, from Australia, or from Great Britain, he is entitled, to a certain extent, to the protection of the laws. You cannot murder him with impunity. It is murder to kill him, the same as it is to kill another man. You cannot commit an assault and battery on him, I apprehend. He has a right to the protection of the laws, but he is not a citizen in the ordinary acceptation of the word.

. . . Now, I should like to know, because really I have been puzzled for a long while and have been unable to determine exactly, either from conversation with those who ought to know, who have given this subject their attention, or from the decisions of the Supreme Court, the lines and boundaries which circumscribe that phrase, “citizen of the United States.” What is it?

So far as the courts as the courts and the administration of the laws are concerned, I have supposed that every human being within [the United States’] jurisdiction was in one sense of the word a citizen . . . . I have supposed, further, that it was essential to the existence of society itself, and particularly essential to the existence of a free State, that it should have the power not only declaring who should exercise political power within its boundaries, but that if it were overrun by another and a different race, it would have the right to absolutely expel them.[4]

He continues:

Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? . . . I should think not. . . . [I]f another people of a different race, of different religion, of different manners, of different traditions, different tastes and sympathies are to come there and have the free right to locate there and settle among them, and if they have an opportunity of pouring in such an immigration as in a short time will double or treble the population of California, I ask, are the people of California powerless to protect themselves? I do not know that the contingency will ever happen, but it may be well to consider it while we are on this point.

. . . [T]here are nations of people with whom theft is a virtue and falsehood a merit. There are people to whom polygamy is as natural as monogamy is with us. It is utterly impossible that these people can meet together and enjoy their several rights and privileges which they suppose to be natural in the same society; and it is necessary, a part of the nature of things, that society shall be more or less exclusive. It is utterly and totally impossible to mingle all the various families of men, from the lowest form of the Hottentot up to the highest Caucasian, in the same society.

It must be evident to every man entrusted with the power and duty of legislation, and qualified to exercise it in a wise and temperate manner, that these things cannot be; and in my judgment there should be some limitation, some definition to this term “citizen of the United States.”[5]

He observes that modern improvements in transportation have made immigration much easier and that, unless explicit provisions were to be made, the consequences of the amendment could be calamitous:

Distance is almost annihilated. They [the Chinese] may pour in their millions upon our Pacific coast in a very short time. Are the States to lose control over this immigration? Is the United States to determine that they are to be citizens? I wish to be understood that I consider those people to have rights just the same as we have, but not rights in connection with our Government. If I desire the exercise of my rights I ought to go to my own people, the people of my own blood and lineage, people of the same religion, people of the same beliefs and traditions, and not thrust myself in upon a society of other men entirely different in all those respects from myself. . . . Therefore I think, before we assert broadly that everybody who shall be born in the United States shall be taken to be a citizen of the United States, we ought to exclude others besides Indians not taxed . . . .[6]

Conness then responds to Cowan’s objections:

Now, I will say, for the benefit of my friend, that he may know something about the Chinese in future [sic], that this portion of our population, namely, the children of Mongolian parentage, born in California, is very small indeed, and never promises to be large, notwithstanding our near neighborhood to the Celestial land. The habits of those people, and their religion, appear to demand that they all return to their own country at some time or other, either alive or dead.[7]

He states with confidence that the Chinese population in America will never exceed forty-five thousand. He implicitly agrees with the premise that excessive immigration is not a good thing, but he asserts that white Californians are prepared to “provide against any evils that may flow” from the presence of the Chinese. He sees them merely as dutiful, unobtrusive laborers who will remain a tiny minority.

Of course, California’s Asian population ended up increasing exponentially; it now numbers five million. Its Hispanic population numbers about 15 million. Whites are no longer the majority in California, an omen of what America could look like in the near future.

  

Cowan’s argument is abandoned and not revisited. The vision of millions of non-whites flocking to American shores probably seemed so far-fetched that it was not worth discussing. The senators present did not think it was necessary to provide for such circumstances, so they moved on to more practical considerations.

No one in the debate actively disagrees with Cowan’s stance against mass immigration. Most senators at the time would have more or less agreed with his views. Had they entertained the possibility that Cowan’s dystopian scenario might come to pass, they would have gone to great lengths to prevent it from happening and would have made further qualifications to the Fourteenth Amendment. But the idea was laughable to most of them.

There is a salient parallel to the present day here. Many people see white nationalists as alarmist rabble-rousers. There are millions of white people on the planet, and, from a short-term perspective, it is easy to scoff at the idea that white people could eventually go extinct. In 1866, the notion that non-whites might immigrate here in droves was also an unthinkable prospect. Yet this was to become a reality with the signing of the Hart-Celler Act a century later.

This short exchange attests to the fact that the senators present—excepting Cowan—had little idea what they were getting into when they drafted the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Regardless of Howard’s intended meaning, the question was not fully clarified or expanded upon by legislators because it was not perceived to be a major concern. They cannot be entirely blamed for their failure to address this, as they never would have anticipated that America would one day be swamped with immigrants and that there would be 4.5 million children born to illegal aliens in the US. It never occurred to them that whites might one day cease to be the majority.

Trump is right to put an end to birthright citizenship. It is what the men who created and amended the Constitution would support were they alive today, and it brings us one step closer to reclaiming America as a white country.

Notes

Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, p. 2890 (1866).

Ibid., p. 2893.

Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873).

Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, p. 2890 (1866).

Ibid., p. 2891.

Ibid., p. 2891.

Ibid., p. 2891.

Attack Of The Paleosaurs Or The Dangers Of Sectarianism In Politics

By F. Roger Devlin

Graphic: Voivode Wingate

It appears that polemics against “white nationalism” have become quite the trend at Chronicles, the flagship publication of paleoconservatism. A couple weeks ago I responded to Aaron Wolf’s article “Incidentally White” at radixjournal.com, and now I discover that only a month earlier, editor Chilton Williamson, Jr. had produced a broadly similar piece under the title “White Like Me.” On the very same day, executive editor Scott Richert managed to slip some strictures against “white nationalism” into an article ostensibly devoted to the rock band Cheap Trick (“The Cheap Trick of Whiteness”).

What’s all the excitement, guys? Afraid of losing your readership to Radix, Counter-Currents, American Renaissance, or The Occidental Observer? (I’m forced to speculate here, as it is a common fault of Chronicleswriters not to make clear precisely whom they are criticizing.)

In the interests of full disclosure, let it be known that I read Chronicles regularly from 1997 until the passing of my favorite contributor, Sam Francis, in 2005. I am well disposed to the people working there, even more so since the departure of the magazine’s ursine former editor. Moreover, I have no special attachment to the label “white nationalist,” which I think a clumsy term that should not be necessary to describe people who are doing the most natural thing in the world, viz., resisting their own dispossession. But since many of those I write for or associate with are designated “white nationalists,” whether by themselves or by others, I shall once again try to say a few words in our collective defense. As should go without saying, this is not intended as a defense of everything every skinhead gang in the world has ever said or done.

In fact, there exists no catechism anywhere telling “white nationalists” what they must believe in order to maintain their right to that moniker. “White nationalism” refers to a broad political tendency with blurred boundaries. The term would seem, therefore, to require some care in handling, but the usual practice of Chronicles’ editors has been to place “white nationalists” on the side of the goats along with ideology, abstraction, Enlightenment, and various other devil-terms, while assuming that they themselves are safely on the side of the lambs with conservatism, tradition, Christianity, and flesh-and-blood people and communities.

This conceptual sloppiness is unfortunate, as Chilton Williamson in particular says a number of things which will resonate powerfully with readers of the present website. He recalls a moment spent in a particularly attractive corner of old London and describes how he

felt a sudden access of fury, struck by the thought that . . . all this storied historical loveliness is on the verge of being inherited by barbarians who did not create it, know nothing of the civilization of my people from whence it sprang, and have neither interest in knowing it nor attachment to it.

Somewhat farther down he adds:

[I]n  the present crisis of Islamic jihad, the conclusion that Islam and the West are  wholly incompatible things, and that immigration from Muslim societies should be denied altogether, is an humane as well as a culturally and politically sensible  one. Indeed, it is simple common sense. So is a discriminating immigration policy that, though rejected by liberals as “discriminatory,” is the only one any sane government that takes seriously its responsibility for the present national welfare and a consistent and coherent future for the country it is entrusted with would think of adopting.

Given this essential agreement with those he is criticizing, what exactly are Mr. Williamson’s objections to “white nationalism?”

1. Firstly, he devotes a lot of space to a silly remark by some unnamed internet troll that “the Italians are not really a white people” — without, alas, explaining why this should be taken as an authoritative expression of “white nationalism.”

2. Similarly beside the point is his allegation that “white nationalists begin by defining as ‘white’ people who look like themselves and work backward from there to determine who is, and who isn’t, ‘white.’” This appears to be a variant of the charge that racialists are interested in skin color or other physical traits rather than in the people for whom those traits are a (rough) marker. Clyde Wilson has not found this line of argument beneath himself either. Relax, Chronicles — if “white nationalists” are that stupid, you need not worry yourself about them.

3. Like Aaron Wolf, Mr. Williamson associates “white nationalism” with ideology and abstraction. By calling it an ideology, he means that white nationalism “claim[s] to provide the key to history by revealing its end in the dominance of the white race.” Here I can only challenge him to name a single “white nationalist” — or indeed anyone at all — who has ever made such a claim. These first three lines of argument are all forms of the straw man fallacy; no “white nationalism” exists such as Mr. Williamson describes.

4. Mr. Williamson’s most interesting objection is that “white nationalism is not a political concept at all,” which he seeks to justify with the following reasoning:

[W]hile many predominantly white countries are known to history, no white-nationalist one has ever existed. . . . There were indeed white tribes in premodern times, but no white nations built up from exclusionary, pseudoscientific principles. No such project has ever, indeed, been contemplated up until recent times.

This is, of course, true. But is it really due to a baseless fascination with biological taxonomy on the part of some eccentric “white nationalists” who recently appeared on the scene for no reason? Is it not rather because there exists today, as there never has in the past, a large and powerful political movement united by little more than hatred of the people of Europe, the desire to marginalize them and ultimately — taking the tendency to its logical conclusion — to destroy them? If you really want to understand “white nationalism,” Mr. Williamson, look to its enemies: e.g., Noel Ignatiev, George Soros, the tenured “critical theorists,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, etc., etc.

John Derbyshire recently said something insightful bearing on this matter (Radio Derb, December 18, 2015):  A few decades back one could get a pretty good idea of someone’s overall political stance by finding out how much he hates rich people; the equivalent today is finding out how much he hates white people.

Derbyshire is correct. A sea-change has occurred in political alignments throughout the Western world, and the folks at Chronicles are stuck in the company of white lefties as the last to take cognizance of it. “White nationalists” are not responsible for this shift; it was brought about by those for whom nationalists, conservatives, and the European and American working class are but a single indistinguishable mass of “white racists.” These people do not hate conservatives, Christians, constitutionalists, or Chronicles subscribers: they hate persons of European descent. And as I have written elsewhere, it is the prerogative of the aggressor to choose where a battle shall take place; we must meet them on the ground they have chosen, and that ground, it is increasingly obvious, will be race and nothing else.

There is a place for debates about the precise limits of biological inheritance as an explanatory factor in human behavior, but that place is not in the midst of a political battle. When the enemy is no longer at the gates but actually ruling over you, you can no longer afford the luxury of refusing to fight alongside anybody who disagrees with you about speculative or philosophical matters.

There is even a word for those who make this type of mistake: sectarians. Burke famously defined a political party as “a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” A sect, on the other hand, is defined in my dictionary as “a group adhering to a distinctive doctrine” (My emphasis). A doctrine is something broad, containing many different and interconnected principles.

Sects tend to be small, for it is not easy to get a large group of men to agree to a detailed and comprehensive doctrine; in practice, they usually coalesce around acceptance of some type of religious authority. Politics, on the other hand, is about alliances among men who may disagree on everything apart from the principle which defines the alliance. Sectarianism in politics is a recipe for ineffectiveness because it deprives one of allies necessary to the success of political battles.

This brings me to one last claim of Mr. Williamson concerning “white nationalism,” or at least what goes by that name in his own imagination: viz., that it is hostile to most religions “and especially to the Church Universal,” and that “it is a heresy that cannot be reconciled with Christianity in any form.”

Some persons described as “white nationalists” are indeed hostile to Christianity, while others are practicing Christians. Those with whom I associate generally de-emphasize religious differences — not because we think religion unimportant, but because ours is a political struggle, and we are determined not to endanger its success by falling into the trap of sectarianism. The principle around which we have joined to do battle is the defense of European Man and his civilization; it would not be rational of us to reject allies over theological disagreements (which can never be settled in any case).

Mr. Williams, as stated above, specifically denies that “white nationalism” is a political idea. But if the defense of a people and civilization is not a “political” task, I do not know what the word means. What such a defense can never provide is precisely the sort of comprehensive belief system or substitute religion Mr. Williamson takes “white nationalism” for. We have a battle to win, not a doctrine or system to agree upon—and young people first coming to the movement would be well advised to keep this distinction in mind.

I am aware that Chronicles is “a magazine of American culture” rather than an exclusively political magazine, and that is all to the good: I, too, believe that the highest values transcend politics. But even they will be lost to us if we fail to defend our European, Christian — and, yes, white — civilization from its enemies. It is as momentous a struggle as we have ever faced, and sooner or later, Chronicles’ readers — or the best of them — are no longer going to be held aloof from it by the editors’ ill-informed sectarian polemics against the bugaboo of “white nationalism.”