#2: Solidifying the Kulaks

Yesterday a friend asked, “how do you celebrate a country that exists only in name?”

America isn’t gone, but all the institutions that told us who we are & where we stand have collapsed. All the scaffolding of being an American is gone - so what’s left?

We’ve lost the government, of course, & not just in the sense of being “out of power” electorally. Our rulers are foreign & hostile to us on every imaginable axis - ideological, racial, religious, cultural. But I don’t think even a Reaganite boomer in 1985 would have argued that America is its government. (Would they have said this in the 1940s? Would be interesting to find out.)

America also isn’t coterminous with the geographic borders of the United States, much of which is dominated by people with whom we have nothing in common, who don’t consider themselves Americans.

Maybe the biggest fault line between the mainstream & dissident Right is whether America is “a nation of ideas”, or whether Real Americans are descendants of the country’s Anglo (or northern European, or Afro-Calabrese, depending who you ask) founding stock.

Civic nationalism, defined as a thin ‘creed’ of economic & cultural laissez-faire that a Guatemalan peasant can be read into at a border checkpoint, is of course incoherent.

To illustrate, suppose you annexed Guatemala tomorrow & made every Guatemalan an American citizen. And let’s examine the strongest case: suppose that each new citizen that you indoctrinated embraced the Bill of Rights in his inmost soul - & you, the naturalization official, could discern this for certain, or you marched them into the sea.

Well, this new American colony wouldn’t have religious wars; they certainly wouldn’t try to quarter soldiers in civilian households during peacetime. They would allow one another to blog. As far as I know, Guatemalans are already allowed to blog. Would they be Americans, in any sense that an outsider to this arrangement would recognize? Would such an outsider notice any difference at all?

On the other hand, suppose a young man of old Connecticut Yankee stock spends a few semesters at university & now condemns freedom of speech, assembly, religion as instruments of cisheteronormative oppression. Has he stopped being an American? You could make a case, but I’ve never heard a mainstream civic nationalist seriously advocate treating him as such, removing his franchise or having him deported. (Maybe the dissident & mainstream Right can join hands here.)

If the only thing that makes us Americans is our common ideal, but you don’t actually need to espouse or even respect that ideal to exercise full political franchise, then America is (as many dissidents have come to suspect) a fiction, intended to snow agreeable white people into signing away their birthright.

But forget about the theoretical argument: if the civic nationalists are right, & our code of laws is all that makes us Americans, then the American experiment is very near its end. The cancer of 1964 is stage-4 terminal, & we’re just waiting for all of its ramifications to work their way through the legal system. If America survives the 2020s in any sense, it will be as something other than a “nation of ideas”.

But ethnic nationalism has the same problem: too many young men of old Connecticut Yankee stock who are in fact hostile to America & its founding ideals.

From a theoretical perspective it’s easy to envy the cohesion of the Israelis or the Japanese, but it’s completely impossible in America, & not only because it’s morally & materially impractical to expel everyone who doesn’t qualify. Even if you could do it, no matter how thin you set the nose-calipers, you wind up with the monster still in the house - to say nothing of breaking the hearts of all your Irish & Sicilian mutuals.

Everyone knows this - even the actual wignats, I suspect - which is why Esoteric Racism about, like, the Occitans or the Finns has always been an easy laugh line on RW Twitter. There’s no conclusion to take this idea to.

If Real America were really about haplogroups & IQ scores & crime statistics, you would expect most Americans in the dissident-right to be willing to trade their homeland & its people for Norway or Switzerland, or wherever in Europe they personally came from - which will be cleaner & safer & whiter & smarter than the US almost by default. But most of them do actually love America, & are heartbroken at the thought of losing it.

The synthesis is culture.

America is obviously more than just a nation of ideas, but those ideas aren’t dispensable. Believing in the Second Amendment doesn’t make you an American, but rejecting it definitely makes you a fake-ass bullshit American. Culture is the moral & temperamental orientation, the personal history & identity, that makes the Second Amendment feel necessary & right in the bones.

I’m using this principle in particular because, of all American rights, it’s the greatest mystery to the Europoors. It’s not a policy disagreement, where we can compare accidental discharges to justifiable homicides & somebody gets talked into or out of anything. It’s a much more fundamental aesthetic & spiritual disconnect.

A foreigner can embrace the American relationship with guns, but it’s not a proposition that can be signed to in a naturalization ceremony. (An enjoyable day at the range isn’t enough either.) Culture is absorbed gradually & unconsciously across generations.

Civnats are right that American communities can assimilate immigrants & turn them into Real Americans. But they were wrong to believe that this process is trivial, or that our capacity is infinite. They were wrong to believe that immigration is the quintessential American experience, or that it demonstrates any commitment whatsoever to America’s people or culture or ideals.

Of course, all of these mistakes were made before most of us were born, & there’s no going back.

So that leaves Americans as a people who are hard to find.

In chaotic, multilateral war zones like Afghanistan, the Balkans, or US prisons, the simplest tribes form around race & language. These are very effective coordination mechanisms - a jersey that you can’t remove. Americans in 2021 don’t have anything like that - nor do we have a state or any shared institution with which to coordinate.

That’s why people grasped so hungrily for the symbols & sacraments of the Trump campaign. You still see Trump flags over every other house in rural areas, the way you once might have seen the Confederate battle flag - & it’s not because people really want or need Trump in particular to run again. It’s because the American flag still flies over enemy strongholds, & people want to send a less ambiguous signal. (Interestingly, it looks like our enemies are now handing over Old Glory without a fight.)

Trump himself is such a symbol because a person’s opinion of him is such a deep, uncrackable token of cultural understanding. People didn’t love or hate Trump because of any particular policy he advocated; certainly not for any policy he enacted. It was his whole being - his tastes, his bearing, his appearance, his idiolect. He was a Real American shadow creature - & if you were ashamed & disgusted by that, chances are you were concealing some similar feelings about the tribe. But if you’re part of that tribe, he’s Bugs Bunny, & you love him as you love your most uninhibited self.

So much for the 2016 Trump explainer - but what comes next depends on whether these improvisational tribal signifiers can thicken into an explicit American cultural identity, explicitly decoupled from USG, with the power to defeat USG politically or quasi-politically & reestablish American culture as the animating spirit of the state.

In other words, stop listening to classical liberals who want you to “abandon ideology” & “treat everyone as individuals” & “make your identity small”.

People are built for tribe, they don’t want to be treated as individuals, & ideology is the only possible axis on which Americans can be spiritually united. The alternative is that American identity as such dissolves, & things collapse back to more fundamental coalitions - which is to say, an openly violent, openly racial, openly amoral struggle for survival.

I believe the good ending is possible, but it’ll be a near thing, & it will depend on deliberately rebuilding cultural infrastructure that we’ve let fall into enemy hands - & getting our people fully persuaded in their own minds, so that they stop rolling over for every enemy psyop about what America is Really All About.