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What Do White Nationalists Want?


by Jared Taylor on June 01, 2009

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" Lost in Justin Raimondo’s torrent of mistaken assumptions and wild accusations is one useful question: What do “white nationalists” want? By putting the term in quotation marks, Mr. Raimondo has stumbled onto an important truth, namely, that there is no accepted term for contemporary Americans who still hold some of the views about race that were taken for granted by virtually all Americans until about the 1950s.

Until then, most people believed race was an important aspect of
individual and group identity. They believed that the races differed
in temperament and ability, and whites preferred the societies built
by whites to those built by non-whites. They wanted the United States
to be peopled by Europeans because they believed only people of
European stock would maintain the civilization they valued. These
views were so wide-spread, so taken for granted, so indisputable that
there was no term for them. Just as there was no name for people who
expected the sun to rise in the East, there was no name for people
whose views are today sometimes given the clumsy term “white
nationalism.”

The national-origins immigration policy that lasted until 1965
embodied this basic understanding of race. As one of the supporters of
that policy, Congressman William Vaile of Colorado explained in 1924,
“[the United States] is a good country. It suits us. And what we
assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or
allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something
different.” I might add that even if this sentiment shocks Americans
today, it is exactly the view of their own country held by virtually
every Japanese, Israeli, or Mexican.

What perhaps most succinctly characterizes those whom Mr. Raimondo
calls “white nationalists” is the conviction that it was a terrible
mistake to abandon national-origins quotas and throw the United States
open to immigration from everywhere. As Senator Sam Ervin of North
Carolina wondered at the time: “What is wrong with the national
origins of the American people? What is wrong with maintaining them?
What is wrong with preferring as immigrants one’s own kinsmen?” There
were no good answers to those questions then and there is none today.

I believe Sam Ervin—and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Teddy
Roosevelt—shared my desire for a country in which our ancestors were
respected as pioneers and statesmen, not reviled as murderers and
thieves. I believe they wanted a country in which their children’s
children would walk in the ways of their forebears, sing the same
songs, worship the same God, revere the same heroes, and proudly carry
forward the civilization and culture of the West. I am certain they
believed this would be possible only in a nation whose majority people
were the biological heirs to the creators of that culture and
civilization.

My hopes for the land in which my descendants will live are no
different from those of virtually every person who has ever lived
anywhere. The idea that nothing will be lost if a founding population
is replaced with aliens is a new disease that strikes only whites. Our
Mexican neighbors would scoff at the notion that “diversity” is a
strength or that millions of English-speaking, white-skinned
immigrants were a form of “cultural enrichment.” They would be
astonished at the idea of elevating to a position of power a gringa
who claimed white women made better decisions than Mexican men. In all
these things they could not be more natural, normal, or healthy. It is
we who have betrayed the ideals of our ancestors and diced with our
children’s future by opening the doors to dispossession.

Is dispossession too strong a word? Just visit Detroit or Miami or
parts of Los Angeles. You will not find the civilization Jefferson or
Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt thought they were building for their
children. There are great swathes of America in which Spanish—or even
Chinese—is the lingua franca, and where English-speakers are out of
place. At the college down the road there are footbaths in the student
union so Muslim immigrants can clean their feet before salaaming in
the worship area they demanded be set aside for them. Washington’s and
Jefferson’s names are being pulled down from public schools to be
replaced with Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King.

I am not certain it is possible to salvage from the chaos immigration
is bringing to this country a nation of which my grandchildren can
even feel a part, much less be proud. But unless whites wake up from
their stupor, unless they—like the white firemen of New Haven—realize
they have legitimate rights as a group and are prepared to fight for
them, they will be shoved aside by Africans, Asians, Mexicans,
Haitians, and Muslims who have, in addition to very sharp elbows, a
keen sense of their own interests.

It is certainly true that there are many group identifications besides
race. Our deepest ties are to our families, and our loyalties expand
in concentric and overlapping circles: clubs, friends, work groups,
nationalities, even cities and states. But the largest group to which
most people feel a natural loyalty is race. That is because race marks
the limit of our extended families, and defines the group to which we
are genetically closer than to any other.

Loyalties of this kind are not rational but they are no less powerful
for this reason. I love my own children more than I love the children
of strangers, not because they are objectively superior but because
they are mine. No one disputes my right to this irrational loyalty—nor
should they dispute my right to an equally irrational, equally deep
and genetic loyalty to my extended family.

At the same time, though I make sacrifices for my own children that I
would never make for the children of others, this implies no ill
feeling for other children. I can even have great affection for other
children but mine come first. It should not require pointing out that,
in like manner, loyalty to a race or nation need imply no ill feeling
for any other. I can admire and like the Chinese or the Watusi without
wanting my own country or my own descendants to become Chinese or
Watusi. They, in turn, have no desire to fill their countries with
Europeans.

Mr. Raimondo seems to think only a Nazi could oppose miscegenation or
care about the racial/ethnic composition of his country. I’m sure we
can count on him to explain to Israelis who want a Jewish state, and
to the many Jews and blacks who oppose inter-marriage that they are
actually Nazis. And, of course, the many Americans who opposed what
they called “amalgamation” and even passed laws to forbid it were all
Nazis long before Nazism. The Japanese, who would rather invent clever
robots than encourage immigrants, and the Mexicans who do not let non-
citizens own property are no doubt Nazis, too. This is the sort of
silliness that comes from thinking in clichés, from swallowing the
mantras of liberal egalitarianism.

Mr. Raimondo seems to insist on looking at everything from a
libertarian perspective so let us adopt one. Mr. Raimondo does not
appear to understand that I am not proposing a state-enforced caste
system; I want to dismantle the one we have, the one that turned the
New Haven firemen into untouchables. Likewise, I have always stood for
completely free association, and if someone wants to associate across
racial lines that is his business. In 1843, Massachusetts repealed its
anti-miscegenation laws for the same reason I oppose them: healthy
societies don’t need them.

Many doctrinaire libertarians think there should not even be
immigration control. They argue that in an ideal world of private
property each property owner could set his own immigration policy.
Until that day comes, I am certainly not proposing an expansion of
state power; merely a policy that preserves our heritage rather than
devour it.

And what if, like Mr. Raimondo, we are to put libertarianism before
the preservation of race or heritage? Perhaps he has not noticed that
it is only whites who have even imagined an individualism as pure as
libertarianism. How many non-white allies has he found in his battle
against the state? Does he really think Mexicans and Africans will
help him dismantle state power rather than seize it for their own
purposes? By ignoring race Mr. Raimondo is ensuring the failure of
what I take to be his most cherished project.

Where Mr. Raimondo and I most clearly part company is that I am in
earnest about the survival of my people and their civilization. For
that I apologize to no one. If Mr. Raimondo does not see the crisis,
he has every right to enjoy his ignorance, but he joins forces with
the very multi-culturalists he claims to oppose when he denies to
whites an awareness of their group interests without which they are
doomed to oblivion."

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