“Citizenism” vs. White Nationalism (II): Sailer Sums Up
[Peter
Brimelow writes:
This
is the second and final (for now) round in the debate
between
Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer on the viability of
white nationalism, sparked
by Steve`s
review of Jared`s new
book
The Color of Crime,
published by Jared`s New Century
Foundation.
Readers interest in this debate has been intense—after
all, you won`t see it in the MSM!—and we will run some
other comments shortly.]
The
Story So Far:
09/18/05 – The Color Of Crime And The New Orleans Nightmare: George W.
Bush vs. Jared Taylor
09/29/05 – Taylor vs. Sailer—Survival v. "Citizenism"
10/08/05 – Sailer vs. Taylor, Round II —"Citizenism" vs.
White Nationalism
11/08/05 – "Citizenism" vs. White Nationalism: A Second
Reply to Steve Sailer
I
want to apologize to Jared Taylor for not responding
immediately to his second statement promoting his white
nationalist position at the expense of my "citizenist"
alternative.
By “white
nationalism“, Taylor does not mean white
supremacism, but simply that American whites should feel
free to
follow their own interests, as
African Americans,
Hispanics,
Zionists etc. already do. By "citizenism,"
I mean that I believe Americans and their government
should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current
fellow citizens over that of the six
billion foreigners.
The
French riots called forth a couple of articles from
me. But now France is back to normal (such
as it is), with
only 100 cars being burned per night.
Because it`s been a couple of weeks since Mr. Taylor`s
last essay, I`d like to begin by quoting a mordant
excerpt from it that I particularly admired:
"White
liberals are
openly, breathtakingly
hypocritical. The appearance of
racial rectitude is perhaps America`s most
highly-regarded virtue, but it comes at essentially no
cost.
You don`t have to
have
black friends, you don`t have to have Mexican
neighbors, you don`t have to
send your children to schools where no one speaks
English, and you don`t have to invite
Hmong refugees to your dinner parties. You can be
racially respectable without doing anything. Just gush
about the things you, yourself, carefully avoid:
integration,
multi-culturalism, and
diversity.
"This is the
Clinton/Kennedy/Bush racket.
"People get away
with it because everyone is in on the charade. By any
real racial test, by any measure that requires
sacrifice, everyone fails, so whites never apply real
tests to each other. Mouth the right clichés and you`re
on the side of the angels. Racial rectitude is therefore
the most cheaply bought virtue in American history— and
also the most easily forfeited. Because only words
matter, not deeds, a
single sentence can wreck a career. "
Amen!
Exactly what he and I
have to argue about seems rather limited by this stage.
Mr. Taylor concedes my substantive point:
"Nevertheless, Mr.
Sailer is probably right to argue that an open appeal to
the interests of whites may not be the most successful
way to sell immigration control."
But he later stirringly proclaims that little things
like practicality and effectiveness don`t matter:
"Duty does not
calculate the chances of success, as Mr. Sailer would
have us do. Duty calls us to what is right."
Personally, I think
practicality and
effectiveness do matter, but that`s a moral
question you can work out for yourself.
Readers don`t need me to tell you what the right thing
is to do. You`re more than capable of determining it on
your own once you`ve heard the alternatives. What I do
have a certain knack for is figuring out how the
world works and identifying the practical
trade-offs that these moral choices involve.
So, what I`d like to do here is review some of the deep
cultural trends that make citizenism more appealing than
white nationalism to white Americans.
This is the conundrum at the heart of white
nationalism—that it encourages white Americans to act
less like white Americans and
more like nonwhites.
Western history has been distorted by the politically
correct to emphasize its dog-bites-man aspects—its
episodes of ethnocentrism and inequality, which are
universals—and ignore its man-bites-dog accomplishments,
of which citizenism is one of the most important.
When Mr. Taylor writes:
"I don`t believe the
traits that characterized whites for all but 50 years of
recorded history have disappeared for ever."
He, like the politically correct, is missing the key
point: there has been an underlying trajectory to
Western history that has produced an America where
citizenism is a lot more likely to appeal than white
nationalism.
Over the last millennium, something perhaps unique in
world history occurred in Europe, especially in its
northwestern quadrant (and, in later years, in its
offshoots like America): a movement away from the
fractiousness of clan and tribe, but without the usual
congealment into despotism.
By inventing
nationalism, this corner of the world managed to
figure out how to make possible the squaring of the
circle of combining individual freedom with cooperation
on an enormous scale. The results of nationalism
included
enormous military power, domestic (but not always
international) peace, wealth, cultural glories, and at
least the possibility of self-rule and
personal liberty.
But much had to be sacrificed or subordinated in the
process of building nation-states, such as many old
tribal identities. Individuals lost their clan status
and became subjects, and later citizens, under the
nation law.
In contrast, the Middle East is full of ancient ethnic
groups like the
Yezidis and Druzes that have made group
self-propagation rather than the
welfare of their individual members their highest
priority. For example, a
few hundred Samaritans, good, bad, and indifferent,
are
still around after 2000 years, living on two
hilltops in the Holy Land. These groups have preserved
their ethnic purity because it is taken for granted that
elders will
arrange the marriages of the young, and will do it
to ensure the ethnic identity and separateness of the
tribe rather than the romantic fulfillment of the
couple.
Personally, I`m glad the Samaritans are still here. They
add interest and color to the world.
But I`m also glad I`m not a Samaritan.
And that points out a big problem for American
white nationalists: white Americans don`t want to act
like the rest of the world, as the white nationalists
advise them to, they want to act like white Americans.
They don`t want to submit their individual freedom to
their extended families, they want to
marry whom they want to marry and then focus on
their nuclear families. They want the law to treat them
not as members of a clan but as individual and
equal citizens under the law.
The normal human condition, though, has been more like
that of the Samaritans than of the Americans. In most
times and places, you would have to rely for protection
from injustice upon your extended family, your mafia.
And you subordinate your individualism to the
family`s solidarity. If an outsider does you wrong,
your relatives will fight for you, but you enter into
long term business agreements mostly just with your
relatives because they are less likely to cheat you.
(Today, illegal business, such as drug smuggling, is
most efficiently carried out by
organized crime families for exactly these
primordial reasons.)
Luigi Barzini wrote in his wonderful book
The Italians
about the benefits and disadvantages of an extended
family based society like
Italy:
"The strength of the
family is not only, therefore, the bulwark against
disorder, but, at the same time, one of its principal
causes. It has actively fomented chaos in many ways
especially by rendering useless the development of
strong political institutions. This, of course, brings
up a complex problem: do political institutions flourish
only where the family is weak, or is it the other way
around?"
Italy is a profoundly civilized place, but it was the
ruder cultures to the north that first began to find the
way out of the seemingly inescapable choice between an
anarchy of competing mafias and a tyranny: a nation of
individuals living in nuclear, rather than, extended
families.
Summarizing the new book
Reading History Sideways by University of
Michigan sociologist Arland Thornton, the Washington
Post`s Richard Morin
reported:
"Many key
characteristics of the `modern` family make their
appearance as early as the 1300s… He says this era saw
the appearance in northwest Europe of small parent-child
families, weakened family ties, independent teenagers
and marriages between men and women who had chosen each
other."
Simultaneously, the northwest Europeans, with the
English and their
common law in the lead, evolved a system of justice that lessened
the need for individuals to belong to Mafias. Their
governments would not only allow private enterprise,
but, through its monopoly on violence, enforce private
contracts, and enforce them fairly.
In turn, this made mutually profitable business dealings
between unrelated individuals feasible without the
threat of violence to insure the execution of contracts.
Over time, vast corporations of cooperative strangers
emerged, able to accomplish voluntarily
feats that slave-driving pharaohs couldn`t dream of.
And governments could
tax the wealth they generated to buy weaponry in
staggering amounts.
As extended families declined in importance, arranged
marriages became less necessary for dynastic purposes,
so individuals began to get more freedom to marry their
true loves.
The English took the lead in emphasizing virtues, such
as
fair play and
sportsmanship, which made the trust necessary for
voluntary cooperation easier to achieve.
And Americans further cultivated the big business
virtues, such as friendliness toward strangers to
facilitate buying and selling with anybody in pursuit of
a profit.
A
world-changing virtuous cycle was set in motion. The
English, having
turned themselves into the
British, became top dogs in the 19th Century. And
Americans came to dominate the 20th Century.
Mr. Taylor asks:
"The great, unanswered
question in American—and world—history, is why the white
man lost his nerve and went from warrior and colonizer
to liberal and loser."
But, as this quick and dirty history shows, it was this
traditional momentum toward expansion of the community,
openness, and inclusion that had made America the
strongest and richest country in the world.
Consider how some of the steps in the dismantling of Jim
Crow grew out of these long-term trends that had made
America pre-eminent.
- The military was
integrated at the beginning of the Cold War,
which allowed maximizing the size and effectiveness
of the combat arms.
- Segregation was
expensive, so businessmen grew tired of Jim Crow,
which had
held the South back economically.
- Branch Rickey
integrated baseball in 1947 by hiring
Jackie Robinson. The Anglo-American tradition of
fair play put on the defensive everyone trying to
deny Robinson his chance.
- California`s law
against
interracial marriage was overturned by the
State Supreme Court in 1948, in part because
American soldiers were returning from the Pacific
War to live in California with their
Asian war brides. Americans don`t like getting
in the way of love and marriage.
But these constructive tendencies toward equal treatment
and broadening of the definition of "us" do
become self-destructive, even suicidal, if there are no
limits.
America`s fortunate status as a middle class,
homeowning society has always depended on our
country being
relatively underpopulated, leading to high wages and
low land prices. The middle class America we love and
admire can`t survive without limits on
who can enjoy the benefits of being an American.
Nor can our freedoms and our
equality of laws and manners survive if we take in
too many people of significantly higher or lower earning
potential than our current average.
So where do we draw the line over who gets to be an
American?
The elites want to keep the line as hazy as possible so
they can continue to import massive amounts of cheap
labor, which will also provide themselves with sinecures
"managing diversity".
Their opponents differ on where to make their stand:
- The white
nationalists want to draw the line within
America, around whites only.
- And the
citizenists want to draw the line
at the border.
Mr. Taylor contends that "duty does not calculate the
odds of success" but I do.
And I`m betting on citizenism, not white nationalism, as
the principle that could save America.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


