Can America Be Saved?

From Occidental Dissent, November 8, 2009

Arthur Kemp, author of March of the Titans: A History of the White Race, has written a new book about the failures of the White Nationalist movement in America. If this name rings a bell, it’s because he is the same guy who wrote about Nordics bringing civilization to China, Egypt, Greece, Italy, South America, and Easter Island. Now he is full of advice for racialists on this side of the Atlantic.

Kemp’s prescription:

1) Strip the movement of “cranks and crackpots” who infest the American ”right wing.” The short list includes Christian Identity nuts, Neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates, the KKK, WW2 hobbyists, and skinheads . . . in sum, everyone offensive to the bourgeois sense of propriety.

2) Reject the National Alliance vanguardist approach.

3) Engage in modern democratic nationalism. Imitate the Ron Paul movement.

4) Reject Judeo-obsessivism.

5) Create a “European-American Political Action Committee.” Draw up an electable platform. Have EUPAC select and endorse Republican and Democratic candidates.

6) Target state senate seats.

Five years ago, I would have found Kemp’s argument a lot more plausible than I do now. I’m not convinced the White Nationalist movement is marginalized because it is infested with kooks and fringe characters. If all of the above types were expunged from the White Wing, which is not really possible in a liberal democracy, I doubt that our media image would change. The BNP’s treatment by the British media is proof of that. Our enemies will continue to smear us regardless of whether or not we wear costumes.

Kemp’s caricature of White Nationalism is twenty years out of date. The typical White Nationalist isn’t an uneducated, hate mongering, tobacco chewing Christian Identity redneck. Even our professional monitors like Leonard Zeskind and Carol Swain are willing to grant that much. White Nationalists are usually middle class, college educated, white male professionals who have joined the movement out of concern about third world immigration, multiculturalism, or affirmative action.

The debate between the “mainstreamers” and “vanguardists” has been going on since the 1980s in the United States. There is nothing original about any of Kemp’s observations. I’ve seen it all before over the years. David Duke famously took off the Klan robes and got involved in Louisiana state politics. He was running for president when I was eight years old. If there is anything to be said for the “mainstreamer” approach, it is that there wasn’t nearly enough follow up in the wake of the Duke campaigns.

White Nationalists targeting state representative and state senate seats is only plausible in the Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana) where white racial consciousness is still relatively strong. I’m not opposed to this. Building a base is a good idea. Unfortunately, no one except Jim Giles is doing it. I’ve complained before that there is no national organization on the ground trying to recruit explicit whites into White Nationalism.

As a radical political movement, I also think our time and money is better spent trying to change the culture than engaging in expensive, fruitless political campaigns. The mainstream right dominated the US from Nixon to Obama, but you would never know this from the state of our culture. If we can change the culture, political victories will naturally follow. Political victories that don’t capstone deeper cultural triumphs will only prove temporary.

Can America be saved? Possibly . . . but I remain unconvinced that plunging into mainstream democratic politics is the way forward.

From “Can America Be Saved?” II, Occidental Dissent, November 9, 2009:

The anti-Semite David Duke was the most successful racialist political candidate of the last twenty years. He was an elected member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for several years. He ran unsuccessfully for the Louisiana Senate, Governor of Louisiana, US Senator from Louisiana, US House of Representatives, and President of the United States. He won the majority of the White vote in two of his campaigns from Governor and US Senator. In Alabama, Larry Darby (a race-mixing, atheist, Holocaust denier) won 43% of the vote in the 2006 Democratic primary for Alabama Attorney General.

The only region of the country where racialists have any chance of political success is the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana) where White racial attitudes are still relatively strong. I grew up in Alabama in the heart of the Bible Belt. From anecdotal experience, I know the statistics are misleading. People around here (in particular, the young) aren’t nearly as religious as the polls suggest they are. They don’t care nearly as much about the Jews as the philo-Semites suggest they do.

The anti-Semite John Rankin from Mississippi served 16 consecutive terms in US House of Representatives. He caused Rep. M. Michael Edelstein (D-NY) to die of a heart attack on the House floor. Theodore Bilbo was Governor of Mississippi and served two terms as US Senator from Mississippi. Anti-Semites can and have won races in the Deep South. The problem is not anti-Semitism. It is that there are no racialist candidates bothering to run.

Communists and White Nationalists

The communist position on race (in the 1910s and 1920s) was adopted by mainstream liberals (1930s and 1940s) and conservatives (1950s and 1960s). Glenda Gilmore documents this transition of radical anti-racist rhetoric from the communist fringe to the mainstream in Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. The communists didn’t have to “move forward” because the mainstream left hijacked their issues.

. . . William F. Buckley . . . watered down the right out of political pragmatism and excluded some of its best minds like Revilo P. Oliver. Instead of fighting the culture war, mainstream conservatives focused on winning elections. The result: fifty years later the right has been routed by the left on every cultural issue. The last Republican presidential nominee was John McCain, a multiculturalist, anti-racist, open borders advocate. If that is winning, what do you call losing?

If White Nationalism ever hopes to enter the mainstream, we must pull the national political conversation our way (like the communist vanguard), not the other way around (like the conservative movement). This means the mainstream right has to become more like us, not us more like them.

Conclusion

Kemp is wrong about the “cancer” he describes. The kooks and fringe characters that he laments were the White Nationalist mainstream in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, they were marginalized within the movement by a new breed of racialist. Carol Swain and Leonard Zeskind, hardly fans of ours, have documented this in The New White Nationalism in America (2002) and Blood and Politics (2009). The typical White Nationalist is a middle class, college educated white male professional who is unaffiliated with any racialist organization.

White Nationalists are attacked for who we are and what we represent, not for our previous associations. Unlike the conservatives, we represent a potent threat to the liberal mainstream. You can’t be “pro-White” and “respectable” in the eyes of our anti-racist elite. The philo-Semites resent having to make that choice and scapegoat the racialist fringe (the Neo-Nazis, Klan, Christian Identity, skinheads) for their loss of status. In doing so, they exaggerate the influence of the fringe out of all proportion to their actual numbers.