July 27, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
NATIONALISM vs. SECESSION:
Should America Break Up?
Friends,
A couple of weeks ago there was a
much-ballyhooed conference in Washington DC (July 14-15, 2019) on what is
termed “national conservatism.” Initiated by Israeli “nationalist” scholar
Yoram Hazony, the conference was part of an effort to corral the growing and
unleashed nationalist tendencies here in the United States and to see if they
might be brought under control, that is, into the mainstream of the “conservative
movement.”
What was fascinating about the over-priced
conference was its list of invitees, or rather the glaring absence of certain significant voices that should have been in
attendance but, very pointedly, weren’t invited, including Professor Paul
Gottfried, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the decline of democracy
and the rise of nationalism and populism globally.
And there was certainly a very
good reason for that. For Gottfried represents
a discordant note and would have thrown a huge monkey wrench into Hazony’s
effort to suborn the unruly nationalist and populist tendencies on the American
Right. Gottfried clearly sees through the transparent efforts by figures such as
the Zionist scholar and some other members of the establishment to reign in the
restive “new Right” which no longer trusts or accepts the failed program of the
nugatory and pallid “conservative movement,” what Gottfried has rightly called “the
phony right.”
Another
acute and on-the-mark critic of the conference and its attempt to neutralize
and domesticate the growing reaction of the grass roots against the American
Establishment was the brilliant young journalist and critic Christopher De
Groot, whose new online journal, The Agonist,
is like a breath of fresh air intellectually.
Commenting
on the one very fearless conference participant, Professor Amy Wax (University
of Pennsylvania Law School), Christopher highlighted
her remarks:
“Amy,
once again, has been an object of controversy. The reason is that in her talk
at the nationalism conference she argued, on cultural grounds, that ‘our
country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites’…. She also
thinks that ‘we must ensure that bad habits from the Third World…are not
allowed to infect and undermine the First’.”
Apparently, this was not what most of the attendees had come to
hear. These remarks were not, clearly, about controlling the unwashed dissident
Right and avoiding issues of division like race and gender, issues the “conservative
movement” in its effort to stress national unity and “American Exceptionalism” wishes
strenuously to downplay (or even incorporate into its program). Rather they
spoke to the necessity of homogeneity and organicism as conditions for national
survival, aspects that are quickly disappearing in modern American society. Professor Wax, thus, acknowledged the elephant in the room: a
culturally-based recognition of the importance of historical ethnicity and certain
shared beliefs as a foundation for any successful polity.
Professor Wax’s presentation and the commentaries by Paul Gottfried
and Christopher De Groot highlight and bring up another question, a question
that, in many ways, is more profound and more basic than whether a
newly-resurgent American nationalism may be harnessed to serve the current
conservative movement.
And that question is this: Despite the rise of a new
nationalism, given the situation in the United States, can this nation actually
survive as a nation, as a functioning entity under its 1787 Constitution in a
modern world where the centrifugal forces of division and separation now appear
overwhelming and unstoppable, without some form of dictatorship? Has not the disruption and radicalization of
polarities advanced too far for even a revived nationalism to put the pieces
back together? Is there not another option?
Already there is a movement in California—“Calexit”—for California
to secede, to separate from the Federal union. After all, California is, for
all intents and purposes, like a Third World country governed by an hysterical Progressivist
junta and embracing every insane and mad nostrum that the loony Left comes up
with. Why not let them—along with Oregon and Washington State—go their own
separate ways (perhaps with, yes painful, population exchanges for those in
disaccord)? Wouldn’t things be better for the rest of us if they were out of
the union?
These disquieting questions should be raised, and, in some ways
they may be as important or even more important than examining a new American
nationalism and how it might (or might not) figure in revitalizing the moribund
conservative movement.
*****
Yesterday I had a major essay on this topic published by THE UNZ
REVIEW, and I pass it along to you. Certain small portions of this piece I had
used in the MY CORNER installment of July 24. But this essay is longer and new,
and is now a featured article at UNZ (and I see that another Web site, Vox Day,
has already linked to
it):
THE UNZ REVIEW
Is It Time
for America to Break Apart?
There
is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our
conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with
family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and
associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back
and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of
any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the
background like an unchained wild beast:
What
has happened—what is happening—to the geographical entity we call the United
States, to its people, to its culture? Does it not seem like the country is
coming apart at the seams, in just about everything, from its once-established
moral base in a more or less historic Christian framework to its very vision of
reality, of what is real and what is not?
Millions
of “woke” social justice progressives now control the Democratic Party and most
of our media; they dominate our entertainment and sports industries; they push
for open borders and what amounts to “population replacement” of natives by
illegal aliens; and they have a stranglehold on the near entirety of our
educational system, from the primary grades to our colleges.
Each
year those institutions turn out millions of freshly-minted
automatons—intellectual zombies—who think like their unhinged teachers and
professors have trained them, and who then take up responsible positions in our
society and increasingly support and vote for a type of veritable madness
which, like an unstoppable centrifugal force, is tearing this country apart,
creating unbridgeable divisions that no amount of misdirected pleading or faux-compromise
can repair.
The
progressives loudly tout their support for “equality” and what they term
“liberation from arbitrary restraints.” They tell us that they are working
against historic “racism and sexism.” But, in actuality, their program turns
real liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in
unrequited passions and desires, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a
pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K.
Chesterton, the definition of actual lunacy.
In
his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s
character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?’’ He responds, in
part:
“First
and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the
yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and
if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.
“The
lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return…. The man who opened the
bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much… But the man who broke the bowl
merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only
possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging
with a desire to be outside of everything.” [bolding added]
The
social justice fanatics who demonstrate in the streets, who appear nightly on
our news channels broadcasting the ideological virus they call news, who parade
before a House or Senate committee (or serve on that
committee!), and who indoctrinate gullible and intellectually-abused students
in supposed centers of higher education, are, to use Chesterton’s parable,
lunatics. They are “already outside the world of reason,” and their
unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to
create anything of real and lasting value.
They
partake of a virulent cultural post-Marxism that, despite slogans of “defeating
racism, sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy,’’ and establishing equality,
is ultimately unachievable. Its advocates are, measured by the historical
reality of two millennia of Christian civilization and by the laws of nature,
insane.
They
sloganize about “the fruits of democracy” and “equal rights,” where in some
future utopia “racism” and “sexism’’ will finally be banished….but where, in
fact, the very contrary will exist, where democracy will have become a
totalitarian dystopia a thousand times worse and more oppressive than anything
George Orwell envisioned in his phantasmagoric novel Nineteen Eighty Four.
This
element, this force in our country, which now numbers many millions of
votaries, works feverishly and tirelessly to achieve its objectives. And, as we
have seen, especially since the presidential election of 2016, it will do
anything, use any tactic, including defamation, lawsuits, censorship, even
violence to achieve its ends, to turn back what it perceives even in the
slightest to be “counter-revolutionary.”
The
question comes down to this: Is the fragile American experiment in
republicanism begun in Philadelphia in 1787, which required a commonly-shared
understanding of basic principles, now over, or at the very least is it
entering its agonizing death throes?
One
can certainly trace a progressively destructive trajectory in American history since
the overthrow of the American constitutional system in 1865. And the results of
that history are now reaching almost an unimaginable breaking point.
Increasingly,
we live in a country that has become de facto little more than
a mere geographical entity. True, it is still formally a nation, but a nation
where there are in fact at least two very distinct Americas, with radically
differing visions of what is real and what is not real, radically differing
conceptions of what is moral and what is not, radically differing views about
truth and error, and radically differing ideas about using whatever means are
available to reach a desired and posited end. For all the talk of equality and
racism, the revolutionary side in actuality seeks to replace one oligarchy—which
it calls “white supremacist”—with another oligarchy of its own making, in fact,
a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia’’ that would make Joseph Stalin’s
Communist state seem like a Sandals Retreat in the Bahamas.
At
the base of this revolutionary movement is the critical use of language.
Ideologically-tinged words—“devil terms”—now occur with amazing regularity and
frequency: racism, white privilege, sexism, toxic masculinity, equality,
democracy, and so on. These terms have been weaponized and are now employed by
those on the Left—but also adopted by many elitist movement conservatives
(“conservatism inc.”)—to disauthorize, condemn, and damn anyone who would offer
effective opposition to the rapid Leftward perversion of what remains of this
nation.
It
is not only the frenzied talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, but such “respectable”
conservative voices as Bill Kristol, Hew Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry,
Ben Shapiro, the National Review crowd and various Republican
types , who have joined in to legitimize each new progressivist
conquest (e.g., same sex marriage) and attack any real opposition to the
Leftist “long march” through our institutions. Like the hard Left, the
establishment conservatives betray a hardly-concealed contempt for Middle America,
for those hard-working, gun-owning, church-going, underpaid folks who still try
to raise a family morally on a shrinking salary. They see the rest of us as
mere rubes, a servile class who are not supposed to have a voice—this, you see,
is now “American democracy.”
We
are not supposed to question this arrangement; we are not supposed to get off
the “reservation” assigned to us. That, you see, was the way the “new
oligarchy” would work. But in 2016, in exasperation, we did question it, and we
did so because instinctively we knew that the unelected managerial class—a
cosmopolitan and globalist elite—was far more loyal to its own class and more
concerned about conserving its power and authority. It did not give a damn
about us, despite the endless stream of campaign promises we hear every
election season.
We
understood that the chances of success were minimal, and even if we were
successful—electorally highly unlikely—the establishment and Inside-the-Beltway
elites would ground to dust or coopt any opposition, including even Donald
Trump.
But
the unlikely did occur, and the elites—the media, the entertainment industry,
almost the entirety of academia, the progressivist Democrat Left, and also
those supposed defenders of our interests, “conservatism inc.”—responded with
unleashed and unrestrained anger, contempt and condescension. Those elites feel
threatened by the “natives’’—threatened by those of us on the giant fly-over
plantation between the million dollar mansions surrounded by walls in Silicon
Valley and the paneled million dollar board rooms on Wall Street where the
international globalists gather to plot the future of the world.
No
matter that Donald Trump filled much of his administration with establishment
figures and GOP standbys (especially in foreign policy). The fact of his
election had signaled that the mask of the administrative state, its very
authority had been seriously challenged. And what followed was what can only be
described as a torrent of lies, fabrications, assaults on our character, attempts
to suppress our guaranteed rights of speech and expression, shaming us, and
efforts to destroy our livelihoods or get us fired from our jobs or dismissed
from our schools.
And,
of course, there was the Russia Hoax, involving the Hilary Clinton campaign,
the Democratic National Committee, the Mueller Commission, a compliant media,
and the FBI and other intelligence services, and totally false claims that
somehow the Russians “had interfered” in our elections. In fact, the “Russia
Hoax” was completely political; the Russians were not involved, save for a few
double-agents who were actually working for American/FBI interests. It was a
massive, unparalleled effort not just to bring down the president, but more
significantly, to discredit any opposition to the Deep State establishment’s
control.
There
are then, palpably, two Americas. They still use the same language, but they
are increasingly incapable of communicating with each other. Almost weekly
words and terms are redefined beyond comprehension, and those “devil terms”
have become the modern equivalents of linguistic hydrogen bombs deployed by the
progressivists. They illustrate what political theorist Paul Gottfried has
called a “post-Marxist” praxis that has actually moved beyond the assaults of cultural
Marxism towards a new and imposed template.
No
dissent from this template is permitted in our society. If it demands you call
black, white; then you must comply, or suffer the consequences. If your eyes
tell you one thing, but the collective media and elites tell you something
else, “who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes”?
For
“conservatism inc.” this state of affairs poses critical problems: the
“movement” is more or less moribund, like a Persian eunuch at court, of little
danger to the harem and of doubtful usefulness otherwise. Its stale ideas are
not attractive to Millennials and offer no practical solutions to the
challenges at hand. Indeed, in too many cases “establishment conservatives” and
their Republican cohorts in Congress only serve to normalize each progressivist
victory. Creative ideas from the Right only come nowadays from what is termed
“the disauthorized Right,” from the nationalist Right (especially in Europe),
and the populist and Old Right (here in the United States).
Some
“movement conservatives” have recognized this. And there has been recent talk
about the “conservative movement” somehow harnessing the newly unleashed
nationalism and populism—witness the recent efforts of Zionist scholar Yoram
Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism,
2018) to incorporate these tendencies into the conservative mainstream. A
national conference on “nationalist conservatism” was held in
Washington on July 14-16. But such
attempts are essentially efforts by a “phony right” (as
Paul Gottfried terms it) to once again derail real opposition to
the Progressivist project and maintain control over disparate elements (and
also deflect criticism of Israel, always a bugaboo for the Neoconservatives).
Such
efforts will ultimately fail, just as the creation of a new American
nationalism will flounder, as well. Unlike most European nations which possess
an organic history and common heritage, the United States has traveled too far
down the road of unbridgeable division for a rooted nationalism to be
successful. The disparities and extreme differences are far too great.
It
is time to look elsewhere for solutions.
America
in 2019 faces three possibilities for its future:
(1)
Either there must be some large mass conversion of one side or the other (a
‘Road to Damascus’ conversion?), probably occasioned by some immense and
earth-shaking event, war, depression, disaster; or (2) there must be a
separation into independent jurisdictions of large portions of what is
presently geographically the United States, including possible massive
population exchanges—this separation/secession could be
peaceable, although increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst,
(3) the devolution of this country would continue into open and vicious civil
and guerrilla war, followed by a harsh dictatorship. Disorder always abhors a
vacuum, and that vacuum will be filled one way or another.
Given
the present state of this nation, are there any other realistic possibilities?
After all, despite the pious pining of the Neoconservative publicists that
America is the world’s “exceptional” nation, the new Utopia, God did not grant
us national eternity, did not guarantee our future. And our leaders and many of
our citizens have done their damnedest to undo and undermine all those original
hopes and promises.
The
modern American madness, the lunacy—and that is certainly what it is—increases
exponentially, it seems, on a daily basis. There are so many examples of it, it
is so rampant in our society, that our surprise and outrage have become inured:
imagine something incredibly and impossibly awful and crazy…and, lo, it
actually will happen in our insane society.
There
are only a very few things, a few statements by Abraham Lincoln that I can
agree with. One of them is this (1858): “A house divided against itself cannot
stand.”
The
time has come; the moment has arrived for us to discuss not only what is wrong
with the country, but how we actually might resolve the issues that confront
us. And just perhaps the answer is not a new and
necessarily-controlled or imposed faux-nationalism, but some sort
of national separation, hopefully peaceful, that might be the least
disagreeable course. The other options, all of them, bring violence, civil war,
and probably dictatorship. And that is something we must hope to avoid.
