The recent US elections have really shaken up the American Far Right: what we’re seeing here is a paradigm shift.
The consensus is (from Steve Sailer, Kevin MacDonald, John Derbyshire, VDare, Occidental Dissent, American Renaissance and others) that the white voters, primarily in the northern and eastern states, did Romney and the Republicans in – not the Hispanics and Afro-Americans. Non-white voters, such as Hispanics, Afro-Americans and Asian-Americans, vote on the basis of race – whites don’t. Whites vote on the basis of ideology, not race, whereas the non-whites are in tune with the Democrat Party’s ANC and ZANU-PF style of redistributionist politics. (Even mainstream establishment figures – like Rush Limbaugh – are beginning to notice the racial aspect of Democrat Party socialism, something that I find incredible, and Limbaugh’s comments are so strong that they, in my view, would, if uttered in Australia, see him in breach of racial vilification legislation).
To start with, I’ll explain my own ideological perspective on the matter – and how that perspective has been changed by the recent events.
My view is that the West, at this present time, is run by what I call the ‘anti-white brigade’ – an elite group of politicians, intellectuals, journalists, academics who are determined to drive out the white peoples of the West out of their own lands, and replace them with Africans, Chinese, Indians, Muslims and other Third World immigrants.
The Diaspora Jewish people who inhabit the Western lands are delighted by this program of mass social engineering, being liberal in their politics; Israel – which is the ruler of the Western world – in contrast is more or less indifferent to the internal immigration policies of the West. Israel doesn’t care much about the rise of the Far Right in Europe – you’d think it would be, considering its reaction to the rise of Haider’s Freedom Party in the late 1990s – because it’s withdrawn into a kind of solipsism. Its only interests are in agitating against Iran and gibbering about the Holocaust all day long.
The Diaspora Jewish people don’t provide the main thrust of the war on whites in Britain, America, Australia, Sweden, France, Greece, etc.: it’s us, that is, we whites. We are the ones who have turned Britain into a totalitarian anti-racist police state, which has locked up a woman like Emma West in jail for making a few drunken remarks on a train, but has shielded a man like Jimmy Savile – who raped over 200 children – from exposure and punishment.
The anti-white brigade – which, throughout the West, is primarily composed of white people – is to blame. But it is diffused: it controls not only the political parties, but also the sports institutions, the churches (including the Catholic and Anglican churches), entertainment, the universities, and, of course, the media. One can’t find the anti-white brigade represented by a single person or political party, but if one can more or less know it and its views through The Guardian and The New York Times newspapers, which, predictably, have been crowing over the Obama victory, and declaring that the GOP is ‘Dead’, a party of ‘Angry old white men’.
So what’s the solution? The anti-white brigade must be cleansed – from the churches, the schools, the universities, the parliaments, the police forces, the sports bodies. This can only be done by what I call the vanguard party – the Far Right nationalist party – which must overthrow the anti-white brigade.
In some countries of Europe, some of the Far Right parties do better than others: Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Greece, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Austria, for example, have strong anti-immigrant parties (by strong, I mean with substantial electoral support at the national level); countries like Spain and Ireland have no parties at all. (Britain is fragmented: there are around a dozen Far Right nationalist parties, all of them weak as the other, and all competing, unsuccessfully, for dominance).
There is an internal division – an ideological one – within the nationalist scenes of these particular countries: on one side, there is the pro-Semitic, Geert Wilders and Breivikist wing; on the other, the old guard, which contains remnants of the old wartime fascism and (anti-Semitic) Far Right conservatism. The pro-Semites dominate the nationalist scenes of some countries – such as Denmark and Holland – completely, while in others, such as France and Sweden, the conflict bubbles to the surface within the confines of one party (France’s Front National, Sweden’s Swedish Democrats).
Whether or not there is a single leading Far Right party, which is powerful enough to become a third party (as in Hungary or Sweden or France), or whether or not the scene is fragmented, broken up into a number of different parties and organisations (as in Britain, Germany and Australia) is beside the point: the main thing is that there is a kind of unity, and homogeneity, in these countries. In America, there isn’t: one only sees divisions. There isn’t a single nationwide political organisation in America, only a number of charismatic individuals such as David Duke, Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, Tom Metzger. (When the charismatic individuals die – e.g., William Pierce, George Lincoln Rockwell – the organisation they have built tends to fall apart). One would think that, in America, it would be fairly easy to build a radical Far Right organisation which is centralised (in terms of its leadership) and diffused (spread across the states), following the Bolshevik or NSDAP model. But this is not the case.
This is why, for many years, I have written America off for the white Western nationalist movement. Even Nick Griffin, about six or seven years ago, made some trenchant criticisms of the Americans: he chastised them for their lack of unity and organisation. Why, he asked, should we nationalists pay any heed to anything they do or say? They can’t offer us advice, because they can’t get it together even in their own country. (Today’s BNP is, of course, a shambles, but even the BNP at its lowest point – and it is at its lowest – is a far better model of nationwide organisation and unity than anything America has to offer at present).
I have theorised that this is because of American individualism, its natural tendency towards neoliberalism, and its historical rejection of communism and socialism. Europe is the fatherland of socialism: the socialist idea makes itself felt in social democracy, in the conservative Christian Democrat parties, in fascism, in German National Socialism, and so forth. Fascism sprang out of socialism, and it’s no coincidence that the most powerful fascist party in Europe – the NSDAP – emerged in the land of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Today’s European nationalism has deep cultural, ideological, and intellectual roots in pre-war fascism and Far Right conservatism, and that milieu was definitely socialist (even Franco and Petain were deeply sympathetic to socialist ideas). But America has never had such a thing: it’s never even had, unlike Australia and just about every other country in the Western world, an electorally viable socialist and working-class party. Hence no Mussolini, no Mosley, no Hitler – all of whom came to politics from the socialist Left – has ever appeared in America.
This analysis, while correct, is now, I believe, only part of the story. There are a number of reasons why America is unique, why it doesn’t fit the European model I have sketched out here.
The first is that America, like South Africa and the former Rhodesia, has a very large and politically active African population. This makes it quite unlike Europe, which has never experienced Africans until the immigrations of the 1970s (in Britain, the Africans came early – in 1949). The sole exception is France, which has had a small non-white population for a hundred years: Algerians and Africans (Hitler, in Mein Kampf, is forever sounding off on the subject of the ‘French Negro’ and how corrupt the French were for allowing Negroes into their country).
Countries like Greece, Italy, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and so forth, were ethnically homogeneous, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and the avalanche of non-white immigrants didn’t occur until the past forty or so years ago. In contrast, America – like South Africa and Rhodesia – had a large number of non-whites when it started (or close to after it started).
One can’t underestimate the impact of this. In addition, America – or at least, the southern half – is peculiar in that was run along the lines of a colonial Afro-Carribean state (e.g., Haiti), but the whites there survived the demise of slavery – the whites didn’t in Haiti, for example, because they were all butchered or expelled by the black population there.
It’s this history which explains the obsession of the American Far Right with Negroes – something I’ve always regarded (along with my Australian nationalist comrades) as a quaint, endearing and amusing Americanism.
The second difference is that America is perhaps the world’s only two-party state. Third parties, at the state and federal level, simply can’t win elections, and it’s no use even trying. America is not like, for instance, Germany, which saw the formation, and then quick rise (followed by an equally rapid descent) of a Pirate Party, which stood for nothing in particular, but, in the words of one of its founders, ‘Grew faster than the Nazis’. Australia is a notoriously tough country to win elections in as a third party – mainly because of the proportional voting system, which is similar to the American ‘winner takes all’ electoral system – but even so, there have been successful third parties at the federal level: the Greens, the Australian Democrats, the Democratic Labor Party. But, in America – despite the existence of the Greens, the Libertarians, and so forth – the most important positions, at the federal level, boil down to Republicans and Democrats. The composition of the Senate and House of Representatives is either Democrat or Republican (there are two independents in the current Senate, but both of these vote with the Democrats), the presidency is either Democrat or Republican.
This set-up presents the American Far Right with limited political options. The system precludes the formation of an American version of Jobbik or the Swedish Democrats or Front National and winning seats in the federal legislature. Third parties with a racialist tinge (and the Far Right in America must be, by definition, racialist) traditionally don’t do well. The example of the American anti-segregation politician Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) is instructive. He ran as a candidate in the 1948 presidential elections for an anti-desegregation third party, the States Rights Democratic Party (‘Dixiecrats’) and received 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral college votes: not bad. Nevertheless, he afterwards threw his lot in with the two main parties. From 1954, he was a Democrat senator, and, after 1964, a Republican senator, and was a tenacious opponent of 1957, 1964 and 1965 desegregation laws. (He filibustered, i.e., attempted to block, the 1957 Civil Rights Act, for 24 hours and 18 minutes, thereby setting a new record).
The Soviet Union published an old book on the Far Right in America (Vyacheslav Nikitin, The Ultras in the USA, Progress Publishers, 1981). It’s propaganda, of course, but does contain some home truths. It records pro-segregation Governor George Wallace’s unsuccessful attempt to run for president in the 1968 elections:
Wallace’s loss of votes to Nixon was due to the latter’s adroitness and to strategic miscalculations by the Wallace campaign staff. There was an objective reason too: Wallace, unlike Goldwater, ran on a third-party ticket; American political history shows that voters slight such candidates. Many families traditionally back one or the other of the established parties, even if they do not always agree with its platform. This inertia played a part in the 1968 election too. But even under these adverse conditions Wallace was able to rally almost ten million Americans—proof that the right’s sway was no less in the late 60s than during Goldwater’s campaign. [Nikitin, 'The George Wallace Movement'.]US politics runs on a binary system: it’s either Republican or Democrat.
The third difference, between America and most of the Western white world, is to do with geopolitics – or what I would call political and racial geography. America is unique in that it is on the border with a (non-African) state with which it has gone to war several times – that is, Mexico. Australia, of course, exists amongst Asian and Melanesian nations, but is separated from them by a large body of water: the same with New Zealand. America isn’t in that position. As a result, it’s quite easy for Mexicans (and through Mexico, other Central American Mestizos, e.g., Guatemalans) to cross the border, emigrate and colonise large portions of the United States.
Related to this is that most of the opposition to desegregation, civil rights for Negroes, affirmative action, and illegal immigration, comes from one region – the South. (In addition, the South is hostile to other liberal causes, such as gun control, the legalisation of marijuana, gay marriage, abortion, secularism and so forth). The northern states, such as the states which make up New England (right up on the north-east of the US – Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island) seem to be just fine with those things. As we have seen in recent days, at the state level, they have voted for the legalisation of marijuana, for gay marriage, for amnesty for illegal immigrants. Historically, they have been the states that have pushed abolitionism, and then desegregation, on the South.
Again, this regional conflict is downright peculiar, but then, what do you expect from a country in which these two regions went to war over, among other things, the abolition of slavery?
We will look further at these regional differences in a moment. But to sum up: if you are a white American and a nativist, and you want to stop illegal immigration, and you want to express your political preference for a policy of deportation of illegals – you have to vote Republican; if you are against ‘affirmative action’ and ANC-type redistribution politics – i.e., the redistribution of the wealth of white Americans to Hispanic immigrants and Afro-Americans – you have to vote Republican. There’s no third way.
Kevin MacDonald writes,
The racial fault lines are more apparent than ever. Whereas in 2008, the official version was that 58% of Whites voted Republican, this year, according to the CNN exit poll data, it split 59%–39%. Of course, the White population includes Jews and Middle Easterners classed as Whites but who do not vote like other Whites and do not identify with the traditional people and culture of America. (70% of Jews voted for Obama, down from 80% in 2008, perhaps because Obama didn’t immediately bomb Iran at Israel’s behest. As a critical component of the new hostile elite, Jewish voters are mainly motivated by their identification with the non-White coalition of the Democratic Party, assuming [correctly] that support for Israel is sufficiently bi-partisan to carry the day.) As usual, the White percentage of the electorate continued to decline, from 74% to 72%. And as usual, the Republican Party received over 90% of its votes from Whites.MacDonald continues, ‘As all the research shows, Whites are not going to be willing to pay for public goods that will be consumed by non-Whites. It’s going to make for a very unhappy White minority. Just another cost of multiculturalism’. This is not strictly true, at least in terms if we look at it from the results of the most recent election. There is a real division within the white race, as such, and this goes back to the regional North and South divide mentioned earlier.
Non-Whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama–80% on average. Asians have become like Jews in their voting—focused not on their economic position so much as their identification with non-White America. Indeed, a higher percentage of Asians (73%) voted for Obama than did Latinos (71%) and Jews (70%).
Whites of both sexes voted Republican, with only 35% of White males voting Democrat and only 42% of White women. Even Whites in the youngest age category (18–29 years)–those most influenced by Sumner Redstone’s MTV and by the school system whose main purpose now is to pound the benefits of diversity into the brains of captive young audiences–voted Republican (51% to 41%).
So the Republican Party is the White people’s party. The media is screaming now that the party reach out to Latinos to become competitive again. I suppose that is what they will try to do. But it is very unlikely to work.
It’s not just about immigration. In order to appeal to the vast majority of non-Whites, the Republicans would also have to be the party of entitlements for minorities and high taxes for their White base. Consider the situation in California. In a Wall Street Journal article (‘California’s Greek Tragedy’), two Stanford professors, Michael F. Boskin and John F. Cogan, note that
from the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000. … With 12% of America’s population, California has one third of the nation’s welfare recipients…And as a result of the most recent election, the Democrats have a 2/3 majority in the State Legislature, meaning that they can raise taxes as much as they please. This new supermajority will now see White Californians as a cash cow, to be milked at will until we see the light and leave. California is a harbinger of what the entire nation will look like soon.
So in order to appeal to Latinos, Republicans will have to not only agree to let more Latinos in, they also have to be gung ho on raising taxes and jacking up benefits. This is not even remotely a vision that even a moderate Republican could accept. It is complete surrender, and would be staunchly resisted by its core constituency. ['Disenfranchised White Males: Time for Succession', 09/11/2012]
As John Derbyshire writes,
Republicans are white, but whites aren’t Republican.Let’s have a look at some pictures here, to understand what Derbyshire is talking about. Firstly, here is the map of the Northern and Southern states: the ones in blue voted for Obama, the ones in red, Romney:
When you look at the overall picture, however, we are still fighting the Civil War. That is to say, the contest was mainly between two huge groups of white people who don’t much like each other, with the colored folk playing a marginal role. That’s how it was in the War Between the States, and that’s how it still is today.
In the state of Mississippi, for example, 89 percent of whites voted for Romney; in the state of Alabama, it was 84 percent. In the state of Maine, on the other hand, only 40 percent of whites voted for Romney; in Vermont, only 33 percent.
Barack Obama wasn’t re-elected by blacks, Hispanics, or Asians, though they helped at the margins; he was re-elected by Yankees.
And that works both positively and negatively: by northern whites turning out for Obama, and by northern whites failing to turn out for Romney. In a much-discussed piece by Sean Trende on RealClearPolitics, Trende crunches the poll numbers to show that a large number of whites just went missing. Sample quote:
Almost 7 million fewer whites voted in 2012 than in 2008. This isn’t readily explainable by demographic shifts either; although whites are declining as a share of the voting-age population, their raw numbers are not.
End quote. Seven million! Seven million white voters who showed up in 2008 were too apathetic to do so this week! Trende’s analysis seems to show that these missing whites are recession victims living away from the big cities and suburbs, enthusiastic neither about the guy whose party caused the recession, nor about the guy who in four years has failed to do much about it.
Still, while the Republican Party may be, in a phrase coined by one of my colleagues at VDARE.com, “implicitly white,” white Americans are not Republican, implicitly or otherwise. I just mentioned the low Romney votes in Maine and Vermont. Both those states are 94 percent white. Romney also lost Iowa, which is 89 percent white, Minnesota and Wisconsin, both 83 percent white, Ohio, 81 percent white, Pennsylvania, 79 percent white, Oregon, 78 percent, Michigan, 77 percent, and Rhode Island and Massachusetts, both 76 percent white. Romney lost them all.
So don’t be blaming the colored folk for this. Barack Obama, as I’m sure he’ll be pleased to tell you, is the clear choice of some of the whitest parts of our country.
Quite a big difference there. The only southern state to go for Obama was Virginia (‘VA’). Florida has just been called for Obama, but Florida is, in fact, divided up roughly between Southerners in the north (on the border with Georgia, ‘GA’) and Cubans and Jewish-Americans in the south.
Now to look at the map of the whole country:
We can see that the Obama states are not just the north-eastern ones. There is the West Coast, including California with its whopping 55 electoral college votes. Romney got Alaska, Obama Hawaii. Is there any rhyme or reason to this?
Clearly, the Romney states are not confined to what we know as the South; likewise, Obama’s states aren’t confined to the North East either.
Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of America (2011) has the answer (this is a book I discovered at the Occidental Dissent site – Hunter Wallace says that the book is to the Southern nationalist movement what Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique (1994-2004) is to white nationalism). This book argues that the US, southern Canada and northern Mexico are eleven different regional, cultural and ethnic groups. Here is the map from his book (which seems somewhat overwhelming at first glance):
Woodard’s book is about North America and the eleven regional, cultural and racial types that form it. I will dwell here on ten types – the eleventh, the ‘First Nation’ or American Indian type doesn’t play a big part here (Woodard identifies their region as being central Canada).
Firstly, let’s look at the nations that went for Obama.
YANKEEDOM: I will reproduce an extract here from Woodard, as it’s important to get an accurate definition of this group (which is the one that controls America and forms Obama’s support base among whites):
Yankeedom was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, a religious utopia in the New England wilderness. From the outset it was a culture that put great emphasis on education, local political control, and the pursuit of the “greater good” of the community, even if it required individual self-denial. Yankees have the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives, tending to see it as an extension of the citizenry, and a vital bulwark against the schemes of grasping aristocrats, corporations, or outside powers. For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on Earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process, and the aggressive assimilation of foreigners. Settled by stable, educated families, Yankeedom has always had a middle-class ethos and considerable respect for intellectual achievement. Its religious zeal has waned over time, but not its underlying drive to improve the world and the set of moral and social values that scholars have sometimes described as “secular Puritanism.”NEW AMSTERDAM: Founded by the Dutch, it includes greater New York city. It is a mercantile, commercial region, a great financial centre (like Amsterdam used to be, a few hundred years ago), and has a lot of Jewish-Americans and immigrants – the ‘Ellis Island’ type of immigrant from southern and eastern Europe.
From its New England core, Yankee culture spread with its settlers across upper New York State; the northern strips of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa; parts of the eastern Dakotas; and on up into Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Canadian Maritimes. It has been locked in nearly perpetual combat with the Deep South for control of the federal government since the moment such a thing existed.
EL NORTE: Primarily Hispanic, it extends from Mexico into southern California, Arizona and Texas, and has a long salient jutting through the middle of New Mexico and Colorado.
THE MIDLANDS: Founded by Quakers and populated mainly by German stock, this is average America, and is a kind of buffer – geographically and ideologically – between Yankeedom and the southern states. Woodard writes:
From its cultural hearth in southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware and Maryland, Midland culture spread through much of the Heartland: central Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; northern Missouri; most of Iowa; and the less-arid eastern halves of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. It shares the key “border cities” of Chicago (with the Yankees) and St. Louis (with Greater Appalachia). It also has an important extension in southern Ontario, where many Midlanders emigrated after the American Revolution, forming the central core of English-speaking Canada. While less cognizant of its national identity, the Midlands is nonetheless an enormously influential moderating force in continental politics, as it agrees with only part of each of its neighbors’ strident agendas.THE LEFT COAST: Compromising mainly of portions of California, Oregon and Washington state, this requires another lengthy explanation:
A Chile-shaped nation pinned between the Pacific and the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges, the Left Coast extends in a strip from Monterey, California, to Juneau, Alaska, including four decidedly progressive metropolises: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. A wet region of staggering natural beauty, it was originally colonized by two groups: merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen from New England (who arrived by sea and controlled the towns) and farmers, prospectors, and fur traders from Greater Appalachia (who arrived by wagon and dominated the countryside). Originally slated by Yankees to become a “New England on the Pacific”—and the target of a dedicated Yankee missionary effort—the Left Coast retained a strong strain of New England intellectualism and idealism even as it embraced a culture of individual fulfillment.Now let’s look at the Romney states:
Today it combines the Yankee faith in good government and social reform with a commitment to individual self-exploration and discovery, a combination that has proven to be fecund. The Left Coast has been the birthplace of the modern environmental movement and the global information revolution (it is home to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, and Silicon Valley), and the cofounder (along with New Netherland) of the gay rights movement, the peace movement, and the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 sci-fi novel Ecotopia imagined the U.S. portion of the region as having broken off into a separate, environmentally stable nation at odds with the rest of the continent. The modern secessionist movement seeks to create the sovereign state of Cascadia by adding in British Columbia and southern Alaska as well, creating a “bioregional cooperative commonwealth.” The closest ally of Yankeedom, it battles constantly against the libertarian-corporate agenda of its neighbor, the Far West.
THE DEEP SOUTH: Comprising of states such as Louisiania, Alabama, Georgia.
NEW FRANCE: Southern Louisiana (depicted in the HBO cable series, True Blood (2008-) and New Orleans, David Duke hails from here.
GREATER APPALACHIA: Contains the so-called rednecks, white trash, hillbillies and crackers, who are continually lambasted in American popular culture (well, the northern and Jewish-American popular culture, that is). This region has produced some of the country’s finest soldiers and one can say that the Greater Appalachians are America’s warrior caste.
Writes Woodard: ‘These clannish Scots-Irish, Scots, and north English frontiersmen spread across the highland South and on into the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks; the eastern two-thirds of Oklahoma; and the Hill Country of Texas, clashing with Indians, Mexicans, and Yankees as they migrated’.
TIDEWATER: The bulwark of Southern aristocracy during the antebellum period, a England-like region (which, in the antebellum period, was divided up by class and caste) from which many of the framers of the US constitution came from. Crosses Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina. It’s from here that the American Civil War started.
THE FAR WEST: America’s equivalent of the Australian Outback. This includes the arid portions of Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, California, and other states, and all or nearly all of Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Nevada and Utah. Alaska, from which Sarah Palin hails, belongs to this category.
Florida and Hawaii are anomalies, and Woodard leaves them out of his analysis (southern Florida belongs to the Spanish Caribbean).
So what we have here is not one country, but eleven – divided up into separate regional, ethnic, ideological groups, much like the nations which formed the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Clearly the divisions in the 2012 elections between the ‘nations’ were unusually sharp: it’s a case of Yankeedom, the Left Coast and New Amsterdam – hardly surprising – going for Obama, in alliance with the mestizo El Norte. This election the Midlands swung toward Obama. On the Republican, ‘conservative’ side, there is Dixie (the Deep South, Tidewater, New Orleans and Greater Appalachia) in alliance with the Far West.
The only states which don’t fit this pattern are some states which should belong to Tidewater: Delaware, Virginia, Maryland (from which the Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth hails from). These went to Obama, mostly because of a giant Afro-American and northern white emigration from Yankeedom.
Generally, if we look at a county-by-county breakdown of the 2012 elections, it more or less matches up with Woodard’s map. This is no surprise: Woodard’s map shows these regions at the county level, which wouldn’t have changed much since the last presidential elections (2008 and 2004) when he wrote his book. These regional boundaries are prone to change, but generally they stay the same.
So here is the map: notice that the Democrat Left Coast counties correspond with Woodard’s map, as does the El Norte salient through the southern states:
Further evidence of a divided country is a recent article in the Washington Post (‘Rising Number of States Seeing One-Party Rule’, 10/11/2012). From this we can glean that the Republicans control the state legislatures and governorships of the old Southern Confederate states.
Romney did win the election – as the de facto President of the South, like Jefferson Davis.
In the case of Yankeedom and Dixie, differences have become so pronounced in the past 150 years that violence – leading all the way up to civil war – has, on occasion, been the result. The points of difference then, as today, are race and the question of ‘states rights’ versus ‘the integrity of the Union’. One shouldn’t say that Lincoln was an anti-racist – he wasn’t – but that the Northerners tend to have do-gooding impulses, utopian impulses, which spring from their liberal Protestant background, which is a kind of religious fundamentalism. This overrides any racialist instincts they may have. The North did, of course, practice segregation, but in a sneaky way – it had laws on the books which made it difficult for, say, Black people to go to the same schools, and live in the same neighbourhoods, as whites, but just weren’t as blatant as the Southern laws forbidding Negroes to marry whites and drink from whites-only water fountains. There’s a covert Apartheid and an open Apartheid, and the North dismantled its covert apartheid in the decades after the end of WWII and then forced its agenda on the South in the name of federalism.
This regional and cultural divide has great implications for racialist, nationalist and Far Right politics in America. For many years, I’ve been reluctant, unwilling, to use the word “nationalist” to describe America’s Far Right and racialist groups: it just doesn’t seem right for America – which nation am I describing? The whites? The Afro-Americans? The Hispanics? (Whereas, for ethnically homogeneous Germany, England, Australia, Italy or Norway, for example, the term seems entirely appropriate). Which is one of the reasons why the term “white nationalist” was invented: it captures (or attempts to capture) the essence of the American situation.
Woodard’s analysis is far more accurate than the standard white nationalist one, I believe, because it manages to convey the complexities of, the internal divisions (political, cultural, and intellectual ones) within white America.
These divisions – especially the Northern and Southern one, which is so dominant – don’t necessarily need to lead to political conflict and secessionism. But this time they do, and now, post-election, the new buzz-word on the American Far Right and racialist scene is ‘secession’. It’s spreading like wildfire.
This has to do with Obama’s failings as a leader. I would characterise Obama as a vacant sort of leader: he doesn’t have any ideas for his second term, doesn’t seem to like the job much, or particularly want it very much, which would explain why he was crying at the rally in Ohio on election eve, and why he was crying in that press conference after his victory. (Perhaps he’s going to be sent to a mental sanatorium like Jesse Jackson Jr., who won 64% of the vote in his district, despite a pending hospitalisation for mental illness). But this isn’t to say that he doesn’t have an effect on people. Obama’s effect is that he’s a divider: he divides North from South, whites from blacks, men from women, capitalists from workers, Republicans from Democrats, conservatives from liberals, straights from gays, and so forth. Previous Democrat presidents either pretended that these divisions didn’t exist, or could be smoothed over with a few liberal homilies and attempts at conciliation at round table talks with all the interest groups concerned. Clinton, in his first and second terms, looks like a moderate Republican compared to the Democrats today (Clinton even signed an anti-gay marriage bill) and he really did try to bridge the partisan divide. He apologised to business leaders for for raising the top rate of income tax from 31% to 39.6% in 1993, and quietly shelved his plans to reform the health care system (‘Hilary Care’) in 1994 after it met with furious opposition from various interest groups. These little gestures mean a lot from a politician, especially in a country, like the US, which seems to be perpetually divided and squabbling.
If we are to understand the present political (and racial) conflict in the US today, we need to look at the political model in Jude Wanniski’s The Way the World Works (1978).
Wanniski explains his model by way of an analogy. Suppose some people are out at dinner and have to decide what wine to order. They vote on the issue by choosing the wine, and since some in the group don’t know their wines very well, so don’t vote at all: that is, they defer judgement to the more knowledgeable members of the group. As a whole, they understand their own best interests, and the group decision at the end does reflect the individual interests of the group.
Supposing that they have an expert who really does know his wines – they will defer to his judgement, and their individual interests will be served thereby. But, supposing that he chooses an outrageously expensive wine – some of them will balk, and go with the decision of a less knowledgeable person. If the wine expert does to pay for the expensive wine out of his own pocket, however, the group will eagerly acquiesce to his choice.
But it’s not a mere matter of counting numbers, it’s a case of what Wanniski calls ‘bundles of intensities’. That is, one individual in the group may really, really want such-and-such a wine more than the others in the group. They decide – in the interests of harmony – to let that individual have his way: ‘If he doesn’t doesn’t get his way, he’ll storm off and leave the dinner table, and thus spoil the evening’. They may be indifferent as to what wine is chosen, and recognising that the individual has a violent need, prefer to go along with his choice – despite the fact that it isn’t necessarily as informed as that of the table’s wine expert.
To extend the analogy to the 2012 Presidential election. Suppose that we have a perfectly divided group – five on one side, five on the other – going to dinner. One side wants a wine called Romney, the other, a wine called Obama. Both sides have some individuals who are generally indifferent to which wine is chosen (in this election, there were eight million less Democrat voters than in 2008, three million less Republicans). But the ones who do have an interest, feel that interest with an unusual intensity.
One side says: ‘We should go with Obama wine. It contains some gay marriage, amnesty for 11. 5 million illegals, gun control, marijuana legalisation, trillion dollar deficits, a weak dollar, high unemployment, higher taxes, affirmative action, and more for Hispanics and Afro-Americans whose kids who need new shoes’. The other side responds, ‘But we can’t have that Obama wine: it’ll make us very sick after drinking it’. ‘Maybe so, but it’ll make us feel good in the short run’. Those who opt for the Romney wine are called ‘Angry old white men’ by the other side, and storm off. The evening is spoiled, and the remaining diners order their bottle of Obama wine – they don’t even notice, or care, that half the group is gone…
Who’s to blame? Obama is, because he really should listen more. Wanniski writes:
When a political action is clearly a “wrong” one in that it cuts against the interests of almost everyone, as in this example, communication between the electorate and the politician is sharp and clear, and even the poorest of politicians will “get the message” and act accordingly. But political contests almost always involve the competition of legitimate interests and it is more difficult for a candidate to get feedback from the electorate or for a political leader to learn the results of a political action. For while an idea or action is gauged precisely by a member of the electorate against his perceived self-interest, and he knows whether he approves or disapproves with an exact intensity (or neutrality), the results that flow back to the candidate or political leader are aggregated in the confusing voice of the multitude. If a politician lets himself by persuaded by a biased or controlled press that what he has said or done was approved or was correct, and in fact the opposite was true, the electorate is forced to develop alternate sources of expression to communicate with the politician. They will write letters to him or letters to the editor, contribute to his opposition, demonstrate against him, vote against him, attempt to remove him from office through recall, impeachment, or assassination. And if his successors prove as maladroit in “getting the message”, the electorate will arrange a revolution to alter the framework with the aim of improving the process by which politicians are selected for rule. “Rule”, says José y Gasset, “is the normal exercise of authority, and is always based on public opinion, today as a thousand years ago, amongst the English as amongst the bushmen. Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule essentially on any other thing than public opinion”. [Wanniski, The Way the World Works, 'The Political Model'].As we know, the DJIA fell by over 2.3% the day after Obama’s election – the worst fall in 11 months. The great sage Wanniski would attribute that fall to remarks by House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, which were sufficiently ambivalent on the question of tax increases – he gave the impression that he may acquiesce to Obama’s proposed ‘fiscal cliff’ tax hikes (Obama wants to hike taxes on income, capital gains, estates, dividends, etc.). The markets rallied slightly the next day after Boehner clarified his position in an interview on the evening news and stated unequivocally that any tax hikes were ‘unacceptable’.
The DJIA is an excellent indicator when it comes to these things, but is there a White Man Index which reflects, accurately, the white man’s prospects under Obama? Surely it’s nosedived, to a record low since Obama’s victory. It doesn’t help, either, when Obama’s followers in the media are calling the White Man Index irrelevant, because it’s ‘Dying’, ‘Old’ and ‘Angry’.
In my view, the whites (at least in the Southern half) should just cede – walk away from the table. They have a history of doing so when put under pressure from the North. This time, they have to – as they have done in the past – take their gloves off, and prepare to be hated, by the establishment media, and indeed, the entire liberal Western world, as they were back in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the post-WWII years, there was no person more hated than the Southerner. Socialist and liberal governments, from Moscow to Bonn to Stockholm to Paris to London, fulminated, in raw, red rage, against the Southerners and their racist attempts to stop noble Afro-Americans from drinking from white peoples’ water fountains.
In extremist politics, one has to be hated by the liberal establishment in order to succeed. Hitler said, in Mein Kampf, that if a National Socialist wakes up, reads the Jewish-owned German newspapers, and doesn’t himself and his cause smeared and despised – then he’s wasted the previous day’s work. Hatred, from the right quarters, works well for Jobbik and for the Golden Dawn, and for the Swedish Democrats and the Front National.
I think that, up until the election, the South was prepared to go along with the existing liberal political system: it was prepared to renounce overt signs of “racism”, and even allow liberals in its chosen party – the Republican Party – to parade minority politicians like Marco Rubio, anything to fit in with the liberal consensus in America since 2000; it really believed that its candidate, Romney, would win, after four years of Obama incompetence; and it chose Romney as a candidate because it saw Romney, a Yankee from Massachusetts, as a consensus figure who was malleable enough to cater to the liberalism of the Yankees and the Left Coasters.
There wasn’t anything really wrong with Romney as such: people now criticise him for his campaign but no-one criticises Obama for his campaign, which was devoid of any policies for the next four years. Romney’s trouble was that he just couldn’t garner enough white votes. It’s no use sweeping the board in Dixie, and in the Far West – and getting virtually every white vote in those regions – when you can’t break through and capture the swing states in the Midlands and eastern Yankeedom.
No wonder, then, that the Southerners are mad. How mad? Mad enough to cede.
The binary political system in the US means that all the political energies of any politically active grouping have to be directed one of the two major parties – like pouring water down a funnel. In the Reconstruction period, Southern vigilante and paramilitary groups used violence to ensure that Democrats, and only Democrats, would be elected. Similarly, segregationist groups through their backing behind the Democrats in the immediate post-WWII years. At the moment, the Republicans are, at the leadership level, at least, dominated by liberals such as Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, the Jewish American Charles Krauthammer and the like (although people like Rush Limbaugh, who grows blatantly more racist by the day, is exerting pressure, simply because he reflects the rank and file). But now there’s a real chance of eviscerating the Republican Party in its present liberal form, hollowing it from within, and injecting it with real racialism, anti-immigrant nativism, Southern secessionism, for the first time since the 1960s. Nixon, as we know, through his “Southern Strategy” attempted to capture the white Southern vote for the Republican Party, and he succeeded – by using the technique of dog-whistle signals. Wallace and Thurmond used the same signals – ‘I’m not a racist, I’m just for “State’s Rights” and law and order’. Now, in 2012, the “conservative” whites can abandon the dog whistle signals, because it’s no use playing by the rules of the game when the other side – Obama, Yankeedom, the Jewish-Americans in New Amsterdam and the rest – have any interest in keeping that game going.
Many on the American Far Right have criticised Southern nationalism for being divisive, for pitting white against white, region against region. I’m not saying here, however, that the whites in, for instance, northern California or New England are all bad people – there are plenty there who are anti-immigration nativists and who we would regard as “nationalists”. I myself am temperamentally a Yankee or a Left Coaster and would prefer to live in all-white Vermont or Big Sur over Virginia or Alabama. But the fact of the matter is that the good patriotic white Americans with a strong racial sense are outnumbered in these regions.
I saw on the SBS news this evening a rally by the Klan and the National Socialist Movement in North Carolina. One of the speakers for the NSM said to the camera, ‘We are protesting on behalf of all white people’. Is that really the case? What of the whites who voted for Obama, who want amnesty for illegals, who want to ban your guns and who think that your state, and your region (Tidewater) is composed of Southern scum?
I support all the patriotic, Far Right and racialist movements in the US, and I don’t want to criticise the groups that appeared at this rally. But I will say that there are lot more potential Southern nationalist recruits out there than there are for Neo-Nazism or Klanism. The potential numbers of recruits and supporters of Southern nationalism and secessionism, in Dixie, would number to the hundreds of thousands. This coming surge will be a movement and not a party – just like the secessionist movement in the antebellum period, and the anti-segregation movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
People don’t change much, and over the past two hundred years, the peoples in, say, the Midlands or New France haven’t changed that much at all. It’s a case now, after the election, of Southerners rediscovering themselves – just as, at present in Europe, Germans are now rediscovering what it means to be German (e.g., what it means to be in a position again of leadership in Europe). The Southerner has repressed himself, for the past forty or fifty years, because he was told that his natural impulses to preserve his culture and his identity were ugly. And, from a liberal perspective, those impulses are ugly. But he’s now in the position of ‘To hell with it – this nonsense has to stop’. After Obama was elected, 400 white students and youths assembled, in a spontaneous rally (brought about through Twitter and Facebook) at the University of Mississippi and protested against Obama, uttered racial slurs and burned an Obama-Biden election campaign poster. This was, I repeat, thoroughly spontaneous: no NSM, no Covington, Duke, MacDonald, Metzger or Jared Taylor was involved, no “nationalist” group or individual. The event made the front page of the Washington Post.
The “ugly” Southerner – or beautiful, depending on one’s perspective – is back and ready to fight.
