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In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
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Notes -
I'll steelman white nationalism for you even though I'm not and have never been a white nationalist.
One argument that Walt should have made was that tapping into white racial grievances is a good way to win elections (this might actually be false but you can at least make a decent argument that it's true). Look no further than the success of blacks voting as a racial bloc to see how successful the racialized voting strategy can be. Trump pandered to white identity and won, with a surprisingly diverse base, also implying that the strategy is viable. If he'd actually used the phrase "white people" maybe it wouldn't have gone the same way, but Overton windows and cultures can shift very quickly. Whether you like it or not, tribalism is a real and powerful human characteristic that can be harnessed to win elections. in the election-winning sense, White Nationalism is useful.
Whether it's constructive is obviously subjective, but I think even for centrists you could make the argument that it is. Racializing whites and then using that political power to implement policy could be constructive if you like the policy. Crime is a good example, and I think your discussion of the issue was kind of off the mark. White identity politics has a better chance of bringing about tough-on-crime policies than the kind of race-blind rhetoric you and Wood seem to favor. Black people are not going to vote for politicians that want to put people that look like them in jail. This is true despite the fact that the majority of the cost of black crime falls on black people. "Tough on crime" is a racist dogwhistle in the sense that everyone knows it means locking up a disproportionate number of black people. You sort of touch on this and this essay states it better: the effects of these policies will be racially disparate and voters can detect the dishonesty inherent in not addressing that. Walt should have argued that if you want tough-on-crime policies, it's much easier to motivate whites to vote by disseminating videos of gangs of black youths beating up defenseless white people and signal boosting egregious black-on-white crimes than by convincing black people that everyone'll be better off if we lock up more of their kids.
You repeatedly ask the question "what even are white interests?" which I'd answer by asking "what are black interests?" Is bail reform advancing black interests because it helps blacks spend less time in jail or is it harming black interests because it's letting out criminals that will victimize blacks? Obviously this doesn't have an objective answer but it doesn't follow that racial interests don't exist. Racial interests are just whatever the racial voting bloc wants. I think the majority of whites would support complete abolition of affirmative action, therefore it's a white interest even if the actual effects of that abolition aren't necessarily beneficial to whites. This doesn't even touch on governmental spending which is actually quite zero-sum and much more obviously in one or another groups' "interests". Voting as a racial bloc means a much better chance of implementing policies your group mostly agrees on, and forces politicians to pander to you. The black voting bloc has been pretty successful at doing this. I don't see why whites couldn't do the same thing, and I don't see any disqualifying difference between black interests as a concept and white interests.
Again, these aren't my politics, so maybe this doesn't match what wignats actually believe, I just felt Walt could have addressed your arguments better.
I appreciate the steelman. I don't claim that racial interests can't exist, it just that they get diluted and meaningless very quickly. A sunscreen subsidy could obviously be a "light-skinned racial interest" because it targets as close to the thing itself. Can you really say that affirmative action is against "white interest" when 29% of whites are in favor? It's probably more meaningful to say that ending affirmative action is a "republican interest" given the 14/74 approve/disapprove ratio compared to every other categorization. The more disagreement you have about an issue within a population category, the less useful the category is on that topic. With race categories, we seem to run out of issues that are rationally relevant very fast.
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