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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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a deep and abiding resentment of what the West in general, and the Anglosphere/US in particular has historically represented.

Whatever you imagine “the West” to be, it seems to bear no resemblance to the actual historical reality, in which every important European country practiced widespread, industrialized chattel slavery, as well as explicitly racial conquest of non-white peoples. The men of the West believed for centuries that white people were naturally and manifestly supreme over lesser races, whose backward practices and pathetic excuses for culture needed to be flattened and replaced with the ways of “Christendom” - understood in explicitly racial terms at the time - as part of the destiny of Western man.

You decry “progressives”, yet you clearly believe in a very strong form of historical progress yourself. You want to pretend to cherish “the West” as a coherent and contiguous historical/cultural whole, but you clearly believe that the specific part of Western history when Enlightenment principles emerged - sweeping away bedrock principles and practices which had defined massive swathes of European and Semitic history - should be treated preferentially as a wholesale improvement and indeed irreversible replacement of what had come previously.

Aristotle certainly didn’t believe that “all men are created equal”; he wrote reams of material arguing precisely the opposite. Nor did any of the men who wrote the Old Testament, and nor did most of the men who founded the United States. If you want to believe that ideological principles which are less than 300 years old represent the only important legacy of the multiple millennia of European and Semitic thought, be my guest; it’s an entirely respectable and coherent position. But then you can’t really claim any appreciation for “the West”.

And of course all of this leaves aside the fact that you have still never once engaged with the core claim at the heart of white nationalist ideology, which is that distinct peoples - and I mean distinct in terms of language, culture, religion, heritable proclivities, shared history, or whatever other organizing principle you want to pick - function best as a homogeneous polity, free to pursue its own path and tend to its own affairs. It’s the principle that led to the formation of most of the modern states existing in the world today. Slovaks will have the best and happiest life if they can just worry about being Slovenes and taking care of the welfare of other Slovaks, while Czechs meanwhile can focus on being the best Czechs that they can be.

White nationalists simply apply the same principles to distinct racial-cultural groups within their own countries. Some white nationalists want a unified multinational, multilingual confederation of European-descended peoples; other white nationalists viciously disagree, and believe that all of the different white peoples of the world - from the Dutch to the Poles to even currently stateless ethnic groups like the Basques - should have their own distinct states. The only through-line linking these two diametrically-opposed stances is the belief that there are sufficient aggregate differences in temperament and shared history between, on the one hand, people of European descent, and on the other hand, people of non-European descent, such that the optimal model of political organization is one in which each lives apart from the other, and neither is politically responsible for the welfare of the other.

I don’t know where you see “victimhood” in any of this. If you’re talking specifically about the pathological whining about how hapless and blameless whites are being manipulated and coerced by ultra-powerful Jews into ruining their own countries and failing to maintain the former glory of their ancestral patrimony, then I agree with you that this is a flawed and pathetic attitude. This is not, however, an integral aspect of white nationalism. Many more clear-eyed and practical figures within the movement are far more focused on identifying and combating the unique shortcomings and failure modes of their own people - in the same way that any nationalist of any healthy civilization ought to do - than they are with blaming some other people for those failures.

It may surprise you to hear that I basically agree with you! I want to clarify that I myself don’t answer to the term “white nationalist”, and part of the reason is basically what you’re pointing at. If white nationalism means total opposition to all marriages between any person of European heritage and any person of non-European heritage, then I fully agree with you that such a project would be DOA in America. It would have been successful - it was successful - even a hundred years ago. But, after sixty years of mass non-European immigration, the demographic horse has already left the barn. Marriage between many white people and many non-white people is an irreversible reality in this country as of the 21st century. Marriages between whites and Hispanics are not going to stop. Marriages between whites and Asians are not going to stop. To the extent that white nationalism as a movement cannot figure out a way to work within the constraints of this reality, I agree that it will not be sustainable outside of Europeans countries that are still 80+% white.

However, you yourself have now linked multiple posts of mine which were brought to your attention by @HelmedHorror. (Thank you to him for plugging my work while I was completely occupied by my day job this week.) In those very posts, I explicate my somewhat idiosyncratic and very broad framework for what I mean when I say “white”. In those posts, and in other of mine in this forum, I’ve said that Asians are welcome within the big tent of whiteness. I also see the necessity of integrating mestizo Hispanics into this tent, which will be a complicated but not insurmountable project. Much as modern-day Europeans have genetic ancestry from three distinct populations - Western Hunter-Gatherers, Neolithic Farmers, and Proto-Indo-Europeans - I think it’s likely that the globally-dominant human population in 2,000 years will probably have some combination of European, East Asian, and probably Hispanic ancestry.

Remember that the big division that I care about is “black vs. non-black”. It really is just people with substantial sub-Saharan and Negrito (Australian/Oceanian Aboriginal) ancestry that I think the rest of the world’s populations need to remain separate from. (Arabs represent another major sticking point, and I’m still figuring out exactly what I think the optimal outcome would look like regarding that population and how/whether it could successfully integrate with other populations.) Now, certainly there are people right now with at least partial black ancestry who I could definitely imagine a successful white-centric culture managing to successfully embrace and integrate. (Is Blake Griffin “white”? Is Aaron Gordon? Is Mariah Carey? Sure! If they truly want to be!) This would require those people to relinquish any cultural/emotional/political affiliation to blackness as an identity and to marry and reproduce with people with zero black ancestry, in order to dilute the percentage of black ancestry in the future population to as small a number as possible.

Since the vast majority of blacks will not do this - and to be clear, that’s not an indictment of them, but rather a simple acknowledgment that for the vast majority of people, identity is centrally important and it is completely natural and healthy to relate to, and to value the welfare of, people who physically and ancestrally resemble you - and since only a small percentage of blacks are truly capable of integrating successfully into first-world civilization, it is going to be necessary to exclude them. Right now, in this country, people of mulatto (half-black, half-white) ancestry overwhelmingly relate more to their black ancestry and seek to be accepted by black culture. One can propose paths forward to a future in which the reverse is true, and I’m open to hearing them, but my money is on this continuing to be the case for a very, very long time.

Now, regarding AmRen’s claim that Chris Rufo’s marriage to a Thai woman makes it basically impossible to trust him as a reliable ally to this movement given current political and philosophical realities, is simply a descriptive observation, rather than the prescriptive/normative claim that you’re interpreting it to be. I think it’s a demonstrable fact that most people who are in mixed-race relationships are going to be extremely turned-off by any movement which they perceive as remotely threatening to those relationships. Whether their perceptions are accurate or not is not ultimately all that relevant. For example, a friend of mine from high school - historically a pretty conservative/libertarianish guy, skeptical of the left - was posting on Facebook a few years ago about his support for BLM, his opposition to any “racist” or “nativist” or “anti-black” political forces, etc. This guy is white, but married to a (very light-skinned, evidently of at least partial white ancestry herself) Filipina friend of ours, with whom he has two children. He told me that as a father of mixed-race children, it’s crucial for him to support pro-black causes in order to oppose “systemic racism” that threatens his family. This argument involves total non sequiturs, as far as I’m concerned; what does supporting a black communist organization that seeks to appropriate non-blacks’ resources in order to enrich blacks and prevent black criminals from being punished have to do with the safety of hapa children? But for a great many people in mixed-race relationships, they apparently currently perceive the only two choices as “white nationalism” (scary, bad, unacceptable) or “total unwavering loyalty to a coalition of non-white identity groups who oppose any attempt by whites to exert political will on their own behalf”. Cutting this Gordian knot of branding and public perception is the key struggle of white nationalist/identitarian movements, and in America at least they are fighting an uphill battle.

That’s one of the reasons why, for me, it’s so important to draw clear distinctions and explicitly communicate that we don’t have any big problem with white guys marrying Asian women, or even “thicc Latinas”. It’s not our ideal world, but the ideal world is no longer attainable given current (and seemingly irreversible) demographic trends. We need to work with what we’ve got, which is why some form of Castizo Futurism needs to be the way forward in America, while still fighting hard to preserve overwhelming white demographic dominance in any and all European countries in which that’s still even a remotely achievable possibility.

In those very posts, I explicate my somewhat idiosyncratic and very broad framework for what I mean when I say “white”.

This was a lot of words to explain that what you mean by "white" is basically "not black." This is why I find your views - articulate and verbose as they are - to be incoherent and not entirely ingenuous. You have some very personal grievances based on your, ah, "lived experiences," and basically you don't want to live around black people, but just saying it like that doesn't sound very nice even to other rightists, so you've invented this vision of "white nationalism" which includes Asians and Hispanics and Jews and basically anyone who isn't too dark and black-ish.

It's like claiming you are Christian or "Christian-adjacent" but really, you just like the vibes, so everyone should join your Christianity but believing in God is not a requirement, and all that talk about Jesus is kind of cringe, and why can't we include Jews and Zoroastrians under the Christian umbrella?

You have some very personal grievances based on your, ah, "lived experiences," and basically you don't want to live around black people, but just saying it like that doesn't sound very nice even to other rightists

Call it uh, Scott Adams-nationalism.

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people,” the 65-year-old author exclaimed. “Just get the (expletive) away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.

In another comment I explain why I don’t call myself a “white nationalist”, and it’s mostly exactly what you’re pointing to. It would be disingenuous of me to present myself as a white nationalist, with all of the assumptions and associations that come with that brand, but then privately believe in some other ideology so far removed from the central example of that ideology that the two are totally incompatible.

The term I generally use when I describe my worldview is “white advocate” or “white identitarian”. My whiteness is very important to me; I’m very proud to be a direct descendant of the Anglos, and the Europeans more broadly, who built everything important about the pre-20th-century world. I oppose any efforts to marginalizes whites within the countries whites built, and in which whites are still the majority of the population. I want whiteness to be centered in those countries, and for it to be widely understood that non-white people in those countries are guests and newcomers who must tread lightly and maintain a deep respect for their host societies. And I want the small number of non-European-descended individuals invited into those countries to be integrated not only culturally, but also by blood - marrying native whites, giving their children names which are indistinguishable from those typical of the host population, and hoping their children do the same, such that European ancestry will always predominate in those societies.

In the much longer-term future, I would like to see a mixing of white and Asian peoples, creating a race with combined ancestry from both. While I do have a strong aesthetic attachment to a world in which some not-insignificant number of women look like Blake Lively and Rachel McAdams, in the idea future probably more of them will look more like Mina Kimes, and that will be just fine as well.

The lower classes in America, meanwhile, will continue to interbreed with Latinos. It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not, it’s going to continue to happen. We could build the wall tomorrow in earnest and the Latino population would still be too massive to prevent this outcome. And look, I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life; the appeal of light-skinned Latinas is absolutely not lost on me. My sister is dating a guy who’s half-white, half-Mexican. Really nice guy, we all like him a lot, etc. Based on conversations I’ve had with her, I doubt she’s ever going to have any children, which is heartbreaking to me, but if she does marry him and have kids, they’ll probably look pretty much white, maybe with darker hair than average and the ability to tan, and that won’t be the end of the world. That’s probably what a very large percentage of the American population will look like in 100 years. Again, it’s not my perfect world, but we have to work with the materials we’ve been given and use them to construct the best possible future we can under those conditions.

As for your contention that I am careful not to openly say “I just don’t want to live around blacks” so I construct a whole edifice of fake ideology to avoid looking like a jerk, I think that’s a misrepresentation. Again, my worldview is more complicated than “everyone who isn’t black can just say ‘I’m white!’ and that’s good enough for me.” It’s more complicated than that, and involves a lot of genuine work and assimilation and careful interbreeding. Some dark-skinned Amerindian-looking guy from the jungles of South America can’t just say “I’m white and my whole family who looks like me is white” and that’s the end of the story. There are criteria people need to meet in order to be white, and it’s a multigenerational process.

It’s also not fair to just say “I don’t want to live around blacks.” By and large I don’t want to live around blacks, and I’m pretty explicit about that. But I’ve also said that there are black people in my life who cause me a lot of angst about my ideological commitments, and I spend time agonizing over “well, what if we were able to make an exception for her, because she’d fit right in…” and then I’m struck by how complicated the world is and how ideology is a prison, etc., same as any intelligent and thoughtful person ought to be. My understanding of Mormonism is that they square this circle by saying “If you try really hard to be a good Mormon, you’ll be white in Heaven even if you weren’t in life.” I think that’s charming, and is a more earnest and wholesome version of the RW Twitter memes where people joke about how Clarence Thomas will be invited into Hyperborea.

If more people knew what Castizo Futurism was, I’d probably use that word to describe myself. Unfortunately, that meme has pretty much died on the right. AmRen used to run articles about it, but they abandoned the term a king time ago and I don’t see it used anywhere. Too complicated to sell to normies, maybe? Or perhaps too full of contradictions, too milquetoast, too accommodationist. I’ve thought about trying to bring it back by writing more extensively and with more carefully-considered explications of the ideology, rather than spitballing like I’ve done here. Whatever I do, it’s not going to be disingenuous, although I can’t promise it won’t be incoherent.

This is low effort and not adding much to the conversation.

Since you deleted your other comment, I'm not going to mod you for it (it was wise of you to delete it), but I am still going to tell you that we can see deleted comments, and it does inform the perception we have of how you are interacting with others.

The thing is, I was never all that “far left”. Even at the height of my “college socialist” phase, my opinions were squarely within what would in 2023 be the normie progressive Overton window. Opposing foreign wars and “imperialism”, wanting Wall Street bankers imprisoned, believing in economic redistribution and gay marriage. These were on the “far left” relative to the largely apolitical liberal-ish social scenes in which I had rolled prior to that point, but they would be bog-standard among any self-respecting PMC type today. My ideology now is massively farther outside of the Overton window than anything I believed ten years ago as a leftist.

Have you documented the cause for your swap anywhere?