In response to my article, “Liberalism Is A False Devil: A Response to Duchesne’s Recent Crusade Against ‘Liberalism’”, Duchesne commented:
Up until recently, I believed in this argument, and expressed it in Canada in Decay, where I also argued that liberalism did generate a communitarian multiculturalism which EuroCanadians could use to defend their collective identity and heritage, just like “minority” groups. But then, why did liberalism generate a multicultural communitarianism for nonwhites while adamantly opposing it for whites, not just in CA but across the West? How come not a single liberal intellectual, old guys educated in the 50s, such as Charles Taylor, who has studied liberalism inside out, has found intellectual resources within liberal communitarianism to defend CA’s EuroCanadian heritage? I did, but not a single liberal has agreed with me, and not a single institution in CA has questioned using liberal communitarianism to promote cultural-group rights for immigrants only.
This is just one angle on why liberalism has a capacity to assimilate every idea — communitarianism — into its framework in ways that go against the interests of whites. Another obvious angle: how did the liberalism being defended in this article by James Tucker transition so naturally into the current woke version, with establishment conservatives accepting the fundamentals of woke liberalism? The argument of the dissident right has been that cultural Marxists subverted liberalism, “marching through the institutions” — an argument I also expressed in Decay. But in reality cultural Marxists were able to march peacefully through the institutions, with great careers, because these institutions were already structured morally for a more “progressive” version of liberalism. Is it an accident that almost all the old style liberals of decades ago have accepted woke liberalism? I repeat, cultural Marxists marched through the institutions while collecting a very comfortable lifestyle inside these institutions. They thought of themselves — and many academics still do — as edgy critics engaging in a tough struggle but in reality they were insiders facing 0 risks.
Liberalism is an ideology that many still don’t fully understand, for it is a very difficult ideology to understand in that it has an inbuilt “progressive” impulse generating new ideas and practices against its older, less progressive days. They tell us that the founders of CA and the US, liberals of old (as I argued in Decay) were ethnocentric, believed in the inequality of races, were against third world immigration — yes, and that’s why progressive liberals defeated them: their ways were “bigoted” and against the “equal rights of man”. The populists of today are liberal too, accept its essentials, individual rights, equality under the law — and they are not even trying to restore the liberalism of the founders, but a 1970s version, or perhaps a 1980s version. We can say, for the sake of simplification, as Dugin says, that they are for “Liberalism 1.0” against the current “2.0” version.
The basic argument of this article is: how could 2.0 be called liberal when it is not for free speech, censors critics, etc.? It began with liberal ideologists like Karl Popper, who argued that an “open society” should not tolerate those who don’t believe in an open society. Popper identified both Communists and Fascists as enemies of the open society, but his wrath was reserved for fascists, and even ethnic nationalism. Popper sympathized with leftists fighting for socialistic institutions. For a time, Marxists were for overthrowing the bourgeois liberal state and creating communism, then they said that a revolution could be brought about through radical cultural changes, but then (this is the part that those who blame cultural Marxism miss) in the 60s and 70s they realized that liberalism contained within itself an “immanent” capacity to bring cultural change. Basically, liberals became more progressive as Marxists became progressive liberals. This idea that liberalism should not tolerate the intolerant was reinforced by Herbert Marcuse with his idea of “repressive tolerance”. Liberalism 1.0 rejects this idea, but Liberalism 2.0 agrees with it.
Yes, Jews played a big ideological role in the radicalization of liberalism, but they did so by utilizing the principles of liberalism, not by countering them with a communistic ideology or cultural Marxism. Call it cultural Marxism if you prefer, it still means progressive liberalism. The dissident right has no comprehensive ideology to counter liberalism. It does have liberal populism, liberalism 1.0, which is the most realistic position to take. Race realism is a valuable theory but it is not an ideology, and it cannot match the power of liberalism; in fact, most race realists are liberals, they are liberal racists. The same can be said about white nationalism. I believe in white identity politics within the framework provided by liberal multiculturalism. National Socialists are mainly young alienated guys without any collective ties who think that having social media followers makes them leaders of a mass movement. They represent less than 1% of the population. They don’t get it: NS was soundly defeated by liberalism. The only full ideological alternative to liberalism is Dugin’s 4PT. But as most dissidents are inherently liberal, they immediately assume that “Dugin’s 4PT = the ideas of a particular individual Russian” who happens to say that he “rejects racism”. If they had read him properly without their liberal biases, they might have thought through his argument that the 4PT is called “fourth” without an ism because it leaves open for each people to find their alternative within their heritage, but as white nationalists have no heritage other than race realism, barely any families, not rooted in any community, they can’t make sense of what he is saying.
Ricardo Duchesne opened his response to my last article by misunderstanding my position. He too, he says, once agreed that liberalism created a ‘communitarian multiculturalism’ that could be used to defend the heritage of EuroCanadians. I emphatically disagree with this position, and consider ‘multicultural liberalism’ to be a contradiction in terms. Liberalism, which I define in my last essay and here as ‘tolerance for dissent, the rule of law, governmental noninterference in personal and private affairs and freedom of conscience and expression’ that allows for free and open political and ideological debate, is only sustainable in a monoethnic society. The key distinction in politics, analogous to the distinction between beautiful and ugly in aesthetics or good and evil in ethics, is between friend and enemy; ingroup and outgroup. Only when the political ingroup is innate, when membership is defined on biological rather than ideological grounds, can ideological pluralism thrive. When the ingroup is defined on the grounds of voluntary belief, as in civic nationalist concepts like proposition nationalism or Verfassungspatriotismus, an ideological ingroup-outgroup distinction emerges that necessarily clashes with liberal norms.
This is hardly my original insight. It was obvious to Aristotle thousands of years ago. It must have been common knowledge among the Athenians, because when Pericles reformed the city-state’s government to strengthen its democracy, he limited citizenship to those born of two Athenian parents. Nearly two and a half thousand years before social scientists like Frank Salter began investigating genetic ingroup bias and the relation between kinship and social cohesion, this was already understood almost instinctively. Politicians in our own time have noticed it too. Helmut Schmidt, the social democratic German Chancellor that invited the Turkish guest workers, admitted his mistake in 2004. ‘The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society.’ he claimed, and went on to say that multicultural societies require authoritarian governance to function. His warning was sadly ignored, and today Germans are regularly dragged out of their homes by the police for the crime of dissent. As the Finnish social scientist Tatu Vanhanen has shown, more diverse nations tend towards more illiberal or authoritarian governments.
The point that I sought to make was not that we should demand a seat at the same multicultural table as the unwanted guests that every Canadian government of the past fifty years has so kindly invited into our country. Quite the opposite. I have no interest in fighting for our own exhibit in the human zoo of post-national Canada, and as Duchesne himself points out, it is pointless. The antiwhite multiculturalists will never grant us that, and if we defeat them, we can as easily achieve far more lofty goals.
I wanted foremost to show that liberalism is a red herring, that we live under an illiberal ideocracy, and that liberal norms can only be helpful to us, whether they are actively followed or mere ideals, in our struggle with an authoritarian state. As I have written on more extensively elsewhere, the multicultural leftist state appeals to the defence of liberal norms when threatened. The notion that we live under ‘liberal democracy’ is an important myth for the leftist state. It gives it legitimacy among those that are not sympathetic to its true ideology. This is especially apparent in foreign affairs, where it presents its conflicts, such as the current one in Ukraine, to the public as struggles between ‘liberal democracy’ and authoritarianism. To falsely accept this claim, and to accept the role of ‘illiberal’, grants the leftist state legitimacy that it could hardly deserve less. The Freedom Convoy so frightened the government because it presented itself as a movement against authoritarianism. It called the leftist state’s lie.
I wanted to focus on what is and make a case that even one that hates liberal norms could agree with, so I only implied my own views on what ought to be. I am a white nationalist and a political (but not cultural or social or necessarily economic) liberal. These are synergistic, not contradictory, ideals. Liberal norms can only be fully realised in an ethnostate that defines the political ingroup on biological, not ideological, grounds. My people best thrive under these norms. A ideologically pluralistic society with a fair marketplace of ideas and open and free debate is the best suited to seek the truth, and it is Western man’s quest for the truth that catapulted him so far ahead of the rest of the world that by the beginning of the Twentieth Century most of the earth was encompassed in his domain. I believe that white nationalism is correct, logically sound and emotionally compelling. Whenever the internet carves out a space where we can freely participate in the conversation, white nationalists win it. Liberal norms are not only a theoretical ideal, but also give us a clear path to gain and hold power. If we can win on free speech, everything else will follow.
Duchesne throws around the word liberal very liberally, but fails to define it. He calls Charles Taylor a ‘liberal communitarian.’ I have never read Taylor, but Wikipedia calls him a ‘critic of liberalism.’ That a lefty like Taylor is counted as a ‘critic of liberalism’ ought to at least hint that anti-liberalism is no solution to any of our problems. But to Duchesne, he is a ‘liberal communitarian.’ ‘Liberalism,’ Duchesne says, ‘has a capacity to assimilate every idea — communitarianism — into its framework in ways that go against the interests of whites.’ Is it truly liberalism that has the capacity to assimilate every idea into itself, or Duchesne that has the capacity to group every idea under the banner of liberalism? Duchesne tells us that Charles Taylor, Karl Popper, most race realists and most white nationalists are all liberals, before grouping himself under the same banner by declaring his support for ‘white identity politics under the framework of liberal multiculturalism.’ And this only a few weeks after he wrote an article declaring that ‘If you want a society that values God, Nation, and Family, then Liberalism has to go.’ The liberalism that Duchesne crusades against is so broad and amorphous that he can declare that it ‘has to go’ even as he supports it!
Duchesne is at his best when he is describing our modern ruling ideology. The fundamental premise of it is that the individual should be free from any identity that he has not chosen, that everything about himself should be a personal choice. I have written at length about this before:
Conservatives love to claim that the left is nothing but a patchwork of contradictions and delight in mocking the supposed double standards of leftists. The leftist positions on various issues can seem to oppose each other; mass immigration from the Islamic world, transgenderism and feminism are odd bedfellows. But beneath the seeming external contradictions all these positions are in pursuit of a singular goal, and leftism has an internal logic that conservatives and more radical rightists need to recognise. The singular goal behind every leftist position is maximised personal choice. I have never heard a leftist phrase it this way, but it seems to be the meaning of ‘human rights.’
Feminism and transgenderism are intended to break down the socially proscribed differences between men and women, so that the individual can choose his own gender identity. Antiracism is intended to break down racial identities so that the individual is not bound by anything, least of all his biological inheritance, unless he so chooses, as is leftist opposition to the family. Mass migration and multiculturalism are intended to break down the national state and instead create postnational states where citizenship is purely a matter of personal choice, with no cultural commitments. The LGBT movement is intended to break down heteronormativity so that the individual is not pressed upon to adopt any particular lifestyle. The aptly named pro-choice movement is intended to remove all potential consequences from sex which might limit personal choice. Always the goal is to level any unchosen differences between individuals, to create equality, so that the individual can choose everything for himself and define himself entirely as he pleases.
I can see how Duchesne can tie this to older liberal ideas of freedom. But there is an important distinction:
By ‘maximum personal choice’ I mean not that leftism seeks to let everyone do as they please to the greatest extent possible. I mean that the available choices and forms of self-expression available to everyone are maximised, and leftism, far from being irrational, impractical or overly idealistic in this regard, recognises the contradiction between the two and is indifferent or even opposed to the former. Personal choice is not maximised through personal freedom, but through collective effort. In the example of transgenderism, which best demonstrates applied leftism, it makes little difference if one is merely free to declare himself a woman and the rest of society pays no attention. If the individual is really to be able to choose whether or not he is a man or a woman, the entirety of society must acknowledge his choice. Leftism is rational enough to understand that the personal choice of others to decide for themselves who is a man and who is a woman is an obstacle to this, and logically, in light of leftism’s goal of maximum overall personal choice, favours the socially constructed ability to choose one’s gender over personal conscience. While entirely individualistic in goal, leftism is necessarily collectivistic in practice.
The following singular quote from the prince of Nineteenth Century liberalism, Herbert Spencer, encapsulates the difference between the liberal ideal of freedom and the leftist idea of choice.
‘They have no work,’ you say. Say rather that they either refuse work or quickly turn themselves out of it. They are simply good-for-nothings, who in one way or other live on the good-for-somethings—vagrants and sots, criminals and those on the way to crime, youths who are burdens on hard-worked parents, men who appropriate the wages of their wives, fellows who share the gains of prostitutes; and then, less visible and less numerous, there is a corresponding class of women. Is it natural that happiness should be the lot of such? or is it natural that they should bring unhappiness on themselves and those connected with them? Is it not manifest that there must exist in our midst an immense amount of misery which is a normal result of misconduct, and ought not to be dissociated from it? There is a notion, always more or less prevalent and just now vociferously expressed, that all social suffering is removable, and that it is the duty of somebody or other to remove it. Both these beliefs are false. To separate pain from ill-doing is to fight against the constitution of things, and will be followed by far more pain.
Leftist individualism seeks to liberate the individual through collective effort. Society exists to serve the individual and his personal gratification. For Spencer it is the exact opposite; the individual ought to serve the common good, and if he cannot manage that he ought to suffer for it. His ‘individualism’ is only a means to the collective good.
For Spencer the ultimate arbiter of correct behaviour is neither the individual nor the society that he inhabits, but ‘the constitution of things;’ Nature. Could this be any more divorced from leftism? Leftists have always opposed sociobiology. Critical Race Theory, with its insistence that even in physics equations there is no single correct answer, effectively denies that there is a single natural world that exists independently from humans. Ever since the French Revolution, leftism has sought to elevate man over God or Nature. To quote Whittaker Chambers:
Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
Though he was an agnostic, for Herbert Spencer, a Victorian liberal, it is the opposite. Man is subordinate to nature and ought to live according to its rules. How Duchesne can regard transgenderism, multiculturalism, critical race theory, feminism and all the rest as the logical conclusion of liberalism escapes me. All that he has directed my attention to is that supposedly the old liberalism transitioned so naturally into the current woke version, with establishment conservatives accepting the fundamentals of woke liberalism?‘ But Western history from the Nineteenth Century onwards is not one unbroken march towards wokeness. A radical Republican from the American Civil War that lived to see the Nineteen Twenties would have watched everything that he helped to build torn down. Segregation was imposed. John Brown fell in status from a hero of the Union, about whom soldiers sung marching songs, to a reviled terrorist and religious fanatic. An ethnically exclusionary immigration act was passed. Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard became some of the most highly respected public intellectuals in America.
This change was largely driven by the progress of science. Though the feeble wretches that fill our academies today lie to themselves, it was universally understood at the time that a Darwinian understanding of man was irreconcilable with racial equality. If the transmutation of species is driven by natural selection and the brain is an organ subject to these pressures, it must follow that the same selection pressures that produce the obvious physical differences between the races affect the brain in different ways too. In the debates over Darwinism in England and Germany, its greatest opponents Rudolf Virchow and Sir Richard Owen took a racially egalitarian position while their foes Aldous Huxley and Ernst Haeckel took the racialist position. The victory of Darwinism brought about a change towards a more racialist worldview in the West that continued until the Western Allies found themselves at war with an explicitly racialist opponent in the Second World War. Stalin fought a desperate war to suppress genetics, which was correctly understood to be irreconcilable with Marxism. After the Second World War the anti-nazi reaction was seized upon by leftists to banish racialism and eugenics. In America this was especially easy; for a decade the administration had been led by a Bolshevik-sympathising leftist and was stuffed with communist agents. When Lothrop Stoddard died after the war, he received a footnote of a eulogy in the New York Times. In the twenties he had been one of the most prominent public intellectuals in America.
To support his narrative of liberalism gradually and naturally buzzing forward to its logical conclusion, Duchesne ignores the effects of the Second World War; he ignores the Great Purge of American intellectuals under the communist-sympathising administration of the fourties; he ignores that racialism reached its peak between the late Nineteenth Century and the Second World War, after and not before the triumph of liberalism, and he ignores the influence of mass media in the triumph of our current state ideology. More than anything else, it was the influence of television, and the control of the medium by a few, disproportionately Jewish moguls that ensured the victory of leftism. Were Duchesne to argue that it was liberalism and its doctrine of minimal state interference that let this happen, a rebuttal would be impossible. But today we live in a different world, and the internet has broken television’s monopoly on the mind. It is censorship that upholds the influence of the legacy media. What would have been an ironclad critique of liberalism fifty years ago today is irrelevant.
The leftist borrowing of liberal concepts implies no causal relationship. Is not the entirety of Christian philosophy borrowed from the Pagans? Was it inevitable that Graeco-Roman civilisation should have converted to Christianity, or is it inevitable that new ideologies always borrow from existing ones? Leftism borrows from Christianity ideas about guilt and original sin. Marxism could not exist without Hegelianism. One ideology supplanting or borrowing from another should not be taken to imply continuity or inevitably. Ideologies may inevitably lead in certain directions, but one needs better evidence to show that. A far better case can be made against anti-liberalism on these grounds. Even if one were to accept Duchesne’s narrative that the old liberalism transitioned seamlessly into woke leftism (and it did not), it still took hundreds of years and dozens of generations. Less than four years after Patrick Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed, he plays wokescold to anyone that dares suggest that the left is antiwhite. The other spokesmen for anti-liberalism in the Anglosphere are an even sorrier lot. Sohrab Ahmari collaborates with Marxists through his magazine Compact. Adrian Vermeule wants to make white genocide into a religious mission. Matthew Schmitz complains that liberal ideas of free speech give white nationalists the right to be heard. Anti-liberalism might be an even worse alternative to the current system.
Duchesne’s intellectual courage is beyond repute. I can say the same of no other anti-liberal intellectual in the Anglosphere known to me. Though the human capacity for self-deception should never be underestimated, I doubt that Deneen truly believes ‘that [the British antiwoke author] Murray and [BLM guru] Kendi are burning two sides of the same candle, propping up a revolutionary regime by ensuring that everyone remain obsessed by the latest identity outrage.’ I suspect that most anti-liberals are merely cowards. They are too afraid to stand up to the left where it counts, so instead they attack ‘liberalism.’ Though they present as radicals facing down the regime, it finds them far more agreeable than the more traditional Reaganite/Thatcherite cuckservative. The only conservative on the New York Times editorial board, Ross Douthat, is a Catholic anti-liberal. Vermeule and Deneen are treated far more respectfully in the leftist press than even the most servile of the cowardly collaborators at National Review. Anti-liberalism is a red herring. Even the classical liberalism of Conservatism Inc., as carefully mutilated as it is to avoid the left’s ire, is less agreeable to them than the most authoritarian and backwards, but nonracist, anti-liberalism. Duchesne asks why, when he was a ‘communitarian liberal,’ none of the other ‘communitarian liberals’ agreed that it was acceptable for whites to advance their own interests within the multicultural paradigm. I would ask him why now none of his fellow anti-liberals are willing to defend white nationalism. Even Dugin is unwilling to say that an African cannot become a Russian. How can anti-liberalism be a solution to any of our problems when its leading advocates, apart from Duchesne, are so completely unwilling to deal with the central one? It is a distraction at best and provides an outlet for the more timid rightwing author to avoid the real issues.
Duchesne blames conservatives’ inability to break free from liberal principles for their meekness. Yet Duchesne gave a far better explanation for their cowardice (emphasis added) in his own article on why liberalism must go:
Liberals have a coherent world view whereas Conservatives have a mismatch of impressions, half baked ideas, prejudices, and emotions coexisting within a foundation that remains Liberal.
The problem is not that the old liberalism left conservatives vulnerable to leftist subversion; it is that they never had a coherent worldview. The influential American conservative Russell Kirk even celebrated this; for him conservatism was the negation of ideology. The false dichotomy of ideology against pragmatism (false because pragmatism assumes a political goal, which is necessarily ideological) was incredibly influential on the centre-right of the eighties. Conservatives saw their lack of a coherent worldview as a positive trait. Privatisation and deregulation were viewed as common sense policies and their opponents as blinded by ideology. This is why they failed to leave any real legacy and the culture drifted further left. A political faction that sees itself as ideological, as fighting to realise an ideal society in the real world based on a coherent worldview, always pushes forward. It views each victory as one step towards its goal. The conservative opponents of such a faction have no grand goal of their own. After each victory they prepare the battlements for the left’s next assault. Even if the conservatives win nine out of ten times, society is still one step closer to the ideals of their enemies. Conservatives are doomed to perpetual retreat. One can bemoan this if he wants, but to resist the inevitable conclusion, as Herbert Spencer would say, ‘is to fight against the constitution of things.’ If we are to beat the left, we must have our own utopian ideals, our own vision of a perfect society and relentlessly push forward towards it. We will turn things around when we stop fighting merely to hold our battlements against the latest leftist assault, and instead mount an assault of our own in the name of our vision. Which is a more vivid banner to rally us? Duchesne admits that his own Duginism offers only a framework for whites ‘to find their alternative [to the current system] within their heritage.’ We need a positive vision of the future.
As a thought experiment, let us embrace for a moment Dugin’s framework and delve into our own heritage. In my own case, as as an ethnic Newfoundlander, descended from ancient Britons, Anglo-Saxon settlers, Wikings and Gaels, that means Boudicca’s Revolt, the primordial constitutionalism of the Witan, the free-thinking spirit that survived the Norman Conquest and even eventually infected the Norman barons and drove them to force the Magna Carta on a reluctant King John, the Glorious Revolution, the Age of Exploration and the freedom and adventure of sailing the seas, the settlement of the New World, John Milton’s defiant pamphlet decrying censorship, race war with the Beothuk and Mikmaq, whig history, the Irish settlers in Newfoundland that Gobineau described in a state of total freedom, the Scientific Revolution, Darwin, Galton and Huxley, eugenics and racialism. As Kipling, the most truly Anglo-Saxon poet of all, once wrote as imagined advice given by a Norman lord to his son:
The Saxon is not like us Normans, His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealings,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.
The more that I delve into my own heritage, the more that I find my own views reflected back at me. Liberal ideals of law and liberty are buried deep in the soul of my ethnos.
Duchesne laments that the only real alternative to liberalism, Duginism, is unlikely to catch on, and accuses race realists of deracination. National Socialism, he says, has no hope of achieving popularity and was defeated by liberalism. I agree that those that base their politics around Second World War revisionism and Hitlerian aesthetics are politically hopeless at a practical level. But it is absurd to say that National Socialism was defeated by liberalism. It was not free debate, the open exchange of information, the rule of law, limited government or any other liberal principle that brought down Hitler’s government. It was strategic bombers, tanks and rifles, mostly operated by Bolshevik controlled Russia and the authoritarian, communist-sympathising Roosevelt administration that defeated National Socialism.
Duchesne is fond of berating white nationalists as eggheaded labcoats with no identity outside of spreadsheets. This comes from a mistaken position that meaning wanes as understanding waxes. The less scientific understanding of race we have, the more that it is an implicit feeling of kinship and the less that it is scientifically understood, the less deracinated we are. But this is not how most operate. Rare is the biologist that cares not for the conservation of nature. Understanding often brings a deeper appreciation. Race realists’ deeper understanding of the biology behind race and the mechanics of ingroup selection give them a more meaningful appreciation of their own roots, not deracinate them. Antiracist race realists are few and far between, though there is no logical reason why one should not be both.
Duchesne vexes me when he writes that ‘…as white nationalists have no heritage other than race realism, barely any families, not rooted in any community, they can’t make sense of what [Dugin] is saying.’ I grew up on land that my family received from the Crown for their services in Queen Anne’s War. There is a particular painting that I remember from my boyhood. I cannot remember where it hung, but it is as vivid in my mind as a photograph. It was a Newfoundlander in his fishing clothes and sou’wester, standing upon a beach with the sea behind him. Beneath it was a line from the Ode to Newfoundland: ‘Where once they stood, we stand.’ As a boy I spent the summer months mostly outdoors; exploring the forests, meadows, barrens, rivers, sea cliffs, beaches of my native island, often alongside cousins from both sides of my family, who were my dearest friends. Those words never left me. For three hundred years my forefathers had walked those same forests, barrens and meadows, swam and fished in those same rivers and stood upon those same cliffs and beaches. They left behind reminders of their presence; a root cellar filled in with rocks in a meadow, stones piled in a line that once supported a fence in the barrens, the foundations of a house in the forest. I learned of the history of my surroundings from the stories passed down. One grandmother told me of growing up in a small community on an island and her experience with resettlement. The other told me of the time that my great-grandfather spotted a German U-boat in Conception Bay. I have not read Dugin, but it is patronising to suggest that I, or any other white nationalist, is too deracinated to make sense of him.
Duchesne is right that ‘Race realism is a valuable theory but it is not an ideology…’ HBD alone provides no vision to compete with leftism. Race realism is an essential stepping stone towards a race romanticism, necessarily accompanied by the romanticisation of biology and nature generally. We must appreciate the monistic, naturalistic conception of man as an animal, evolved through natural selection like any other, not only as a fact, but as the basis for our moral instincts and all normative ideals. White nationalism, if built on these foundations, is a comprehensive ideology that can counter and overcome the left. As Roger S. Griffin wrote in The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds:
In order to understand racialists such as [Revilo P.] Oliver and [William Luther] Pierce, one must keep in mind that they look upon the human being as an animal like any other animal in nature. To them, the human being is a species of animal, with the races being sub-species or breeds. That is to say, they don’t see simply one human race. They see one human being, or human animal, and a number of human races.
Unlike anti-liberalism, which is easily corrupted to serve leftist ends, this white nationalism is intractably opposed to the multicultural leftist state at an existential level. Duginism can be only an obstacle to the progress of this ideology and its quest to realise a new, but historically well-precedented, kind of state based upon the innate biological unity of the people. Dugin is hostile not only to race science, but to Western science generally. His view is no different from the woke one:
Core pieces of the modern science, such as Heisenberg, Schrodinger or Pauli, recognized that science as nothing but a projection of the human mind. That is not the explanation of the reality. We cannot identify what is reality and what is not. The science cannot affirm that it is built on pure truth, it is just a projection of the mind. Thus, we need to return to structures of soul and mind. We need to concentrate on what is the origin of this projection. These are words of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli, Ilya Prigozhin and many other top-class scientists. Real scientists understand very well that the science is just about human mind and nothing else.
Philosophical dressing and name dropping aside, this is not a mere exercise in philosophical skepticism. Dugin is no Hume. This is a firm denial that a natural world external to the human mind exists at all. This is not only theoretical for Dugin; it affects his practical approach to science. Dugin praises the antiwhite ideologue and pseudoscientist Franz Boas. The great irony is that while Dugin blames ‘liberalism’ for leftist gender ideology, a far stronger link exists between himself and the postmodern theorists that laid the groundwork for that and so many other current ills. Duchesne has written many excellent articles celebrating the West’s predominance in scientific discovery. How can he square these with his newfound love for a man that writes the following with admiration?
Boas achieved a real revolution in American Anthropology, wherein, prior to his arrival, evolutionary and Social Darwinist approaches dominated, and racial theories, which explained sociological particularities by innate, inherited markers and racial belonging, were popular, and an inflexible conviction in the absolute superiority of modern Western (European and American) society, its technology and values over the rest of the world, reigned. Boas built his scientific program on the denial of all three forms of racism: evolutionary, biological, and Eurocentric.
Duchesne’s crusade against liberalism emblemises the warped view of history wrought by the influence of traditionalism, as represented by Dugin, on the dissident right. The traditionalist reading of history sees only degeneration, not progress. In every historical struggle the traditionalist identifies himself with the conservative faction. This may be fine for those that long to revive the Holy Roman Empire, or the Papal States, or the Bourbon monarchy, or the Roman Empire, but for white nationalists, whose ideology is a product of scientific modernity, it is disastrous. Rather than point to this or that historical political tendency as the root of our decline and long for an atavistic return to the innocent era prior, we should look forwards to the day when our modern sociobiological understanding of man and our romantic attachment to biology as a source of moral truth overcomes the obscurantist pseudoscience and sick, inverted morality of the left. We should judge past ideas, like classical liberalism, not as steps downwards in a continuous decline, but as they were; products of their time. We should appreciate or revile them based on how they anticipated or opposed the ideas that we hold today, not caricature historical ideologies beyond recognition until they become convenient wellsprings of evil for our own narratives.
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