The common ‘White Nationalist case for Israel’—that if it’s ok for Jews to have an ethnostate, then it is also ok for us to have one—is not wrong, but the case is actually far more precise than that. Our interest in the Israel Question is not simply to defend the idea of ethnonationalism as such, but to defend the particular type of ethnonationalism that Israel represents. Given that we are a stateless people who is ruthlessly demonized by the powers-that-be, our plight is not entirely dissimilar to that of the Palestinians. And I suppose there is some rhetorical hay that can be made of that point, but in terms of developing our long-term strategy, the most relevant example to us is Israel. The position of White nationalists today is directly analogous to the situation of Jews prior to the creation of Israel. As they were, we are a minority everywhere, but yet there are millions of us sprinkled across the continent (and the world). If there is to be a White ethnostate in North America, the process by which it is established is going look something like the establishment of Israel.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that we should be running cover for Israel. There is no reason to task ourselves with defending every of the Israeli state’s many morally questionable policies. And we should be quick to point out how we would handle our affairs differently. The most important of those differences is how we would handle our own version of the Palestinian problem: we would avoid creating one in the first place. While it doesn’t that they didn’t exactly pick the friendliest location for their state, most of Israel’s moral failings and PR problems come down to the fact that they bit-off more than they could chew. In 1967, it may have seemed plausible that most of the West Bank Arab population would have cleared out by now (one way or another). There were many previous precedents of population transfers. But it didn’t work out that way. The lesson for White nationalists is to not count on a population transfer scheme. The territory we target should be lightly populated enough such that regardless of whether the legacy population stays or goes, there are enough of us to quickly demographically swamp them.

But while defending Israel itself is not our concern, it is very much in our interest to defend the basic Israeli model of a self-selected nationalism, because we have as much need for it now as they did then. But whereas the logic that lead to the creation of Israel was an ad hoc justification that trafficked in leftist victimology narratives, ours will be founded on the universal principle of not only national self-determination, but individual self-determination.

The nationalism vs imperialism debate in our circles (see, for instance, the Greg Johnson and Gregory Hood debate from earlier this year) ultimately boils down to the question of what is the White nationalist’s nation, the ethnos or the race? My answer is neither. Instead, the White nationalist’s nation is White nationalists. As a purely practical matter, I believe this is the only way forward. Yes, petty nationalism’s future is dim, but then, the advent of a transcontinental Holy Roman Empire of the White Race is clearly a doomed project too. For North American White nationalists, it is White Israel/Taiwan or bust. This has been the obvious and only solution for decades, and it is highly dispiriting that even at this late date so many on our side continue to refuse to recognize that plain fact. The ethnostate will be a self-selected elective state, or there will not be an ethnostate. However, the argument for the elective ethnostate is greater than a practical one. The practical reality of our situation also opens the way to what is both a more accurate and more idealistic understanding of who we are, and of our role in history. White nationalists have always been our true nation. The idea of nationalism doesn’t make sense unless it is also individualism. The fundamental premise of nationalism is that the nation exists in order to perpetuate the individual beyond himself, and against others. But who decides whether the nation is fulfilling this purpose? For me (regardless of however many others disagree), it is the individual who decides. The nation cannot be an extension of the individual’s will if the individual disagrees with the very mission of the nation, and if the nation is not an extension of the individual’s will, then it is not perpetuating him in any satisfactory sense, and it is not his nation. So then, the individual’s nation is whatever the individual determines. And once he makes his determination, he has a right to a state for his nation.

If this sounds like some sort of liberalism, that’s because it is liberalism, a liberalism infinitely more thoroughgoing than anything Locke or Mill or Rawls ever imagined. But isn’t liberalism the problem? Yes, but not as you think. Liberalism as a political ideology is not the problem, even if that has also been put to ill use. For the nationalist, the great problem is that the very nature of civilization is inherently liberal. Whatever the ideology and workings of the governing regime, everywhere there is civilization, there is also liberalism. The fundamental mechanics of civilization and liberalism’s basic doctrine are virtually synonymous to one another. Indeed, political liberalism originated as a means of adjusting society to handle the problem of civilization’s inherent liberalism. But now I would use liberalism not only to cope with civilization whims, but to solve them once and for all. This solution is to flip both liberalism and nationalism on their heads, such to give each perfect consistency… and and perfect consistency with one another. In my far-sighted view, they become entirely one and the same. Originally, liberalism was designed that the state should exist to protect the immediate sovereignty of the individual. While preserving this gain, I would also make the state as the expression of the individual’s ultimate sovereignty. Mr. Hood is looking for our movement’s Sorelian myth; this is it. Our movement is to bring liberalism to its perfect final form.

As the distinction between individualism and nationalism is a false one, by that same reason, so the contrast of petty nationalism against the civilizational state is also a false dichotomy. I conceive race as the nation’s reason for being because I agree with the imperiumist claim that it is our most fundamental identity, and thus is the group identity which best perpetuates the individual. But at the same time, the ethnostate of my mind’s eye very much has the look and feel of a petty nation-state. Where the race is my objective identity, the nation is my subjective identity. Just as the individual has an objective existence, and also has a subjective will to shape that existence a certain way. Sure, the race is prior to the nation, and for that reason, it is the purpose of the nation. But that is also to say the race is the raw material, while the nation is the finished product. And, of course, the individual is prior to all. And for the individual, the nation is just as necessary as the race. The nation is a portion of the race made in a way according to the individual’s will. The goal is to reconstruct the petty nation-state with a precision that is only possible by the elective nationalist model, which at the end, is to construct the ultimate civilizational state.

The elective ethnostate should be understood as the culmination of the last five centuries during which we discovered the world, and against that backdrop, discovered our race. It is natural and right that liberal ideology should have emerged contemporaneously. In light of the tremendous civilizational advances of the age, the individual gains the confidence to determine his morality for himself. The age of discovery and the age of enlightenment, the emergence of liberalism, the Protestant Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution; these are, broadly speaking, part of the same story. At minimum, these events hang together as the process by which Western history became, or perhaps created, world history. But, for us, it is possible to weave this loose narrative into a much more consistent and purposive meaning when we recognize the elective ethnostate as the end of that history.

The following was adapted from a draft of the forthcoming book The Elective Nation (by me).

Napoleon May as Well Have Never Existed. The reign of the Puritans lasted less than two decades in England, while in New England it endured for something like two centuries. Why such a dramatic difference in the fates of these two Puritan regimes? I think the answer is pretty obvious: In olde England, the Puritans happened to be on the winning side of the civil war, and then triangulated themselves into power, riding the coattails of various other social/political grievances. Meanwhile, New England was a self-selected population, founded and populated entirely by the most highly-motivated of the Puritans for the express purpose of serving as a bastion of the faith. Of course, the latter example produced greater long-term stability.

This pattern is a recurring theme throughout modern history. Why are the Amish still around, while the Soviet Union is in the dustbin of history? Is it because there are more Amish than there are communists? Of course not; it is because the Amish are a self-selected population and the Soviet Union was not. The lesson for radicals should be obvious. If you want to make and maintain a ‘weird’ society and state, you need a weird population, in other words, a self-selected elective nation. Otherwise, the project is doomed from the start. And what is a weird political ideology for a state? Any ideology other than lowest common-denominator liberalism is weird. The further your ideology diverges from that, the weirder it is.

This is not to say that a color, religion, and race-blind constitutional republic of ‘pure’ liberalism is the inevitable final form of political organization for non-elective nations, but liberalism, regarded as a broad phenomenon, is an inevitable fact of civilized life. The logic of large-scale communal collaboration—which is the basic essence of civilization—is always toward ever greater specialization of services, skills, and interests, ever greater specialization of everything really. The advance of civilization is both the cause and the result of individualism and atomization. When you stop and think about it, the mechanics of how civilization works is nothing but liberalism.

In other words, civilization is destructive of community. Meanwhile, it is also (generally) expanding the breadth of the community (generally at the expense of its depth). As it does both, it is also creating new communities. The latter two points do not contradict the preceding point, but rather they prove its point. If this was not clear in the past, it is because such developments moved slower in those less technologically advanced ages. Then, the creation of new community could maintain pace with the destruction of community, such that the most successful new identities had enough time and space to congeal into lasting communities, and elective identities could mature into inherited identities, such as nations or tribes with territories. But the churn of civilization moves ever faster over time, and it becomes ever more difficult for the creative side to keep up with the destructive side. The reach of the community expands so far, so fast today—an age of mass travel and a system of instant global communication on a mass-scale—that the notion of inherited identities is almost an archaic institution altogether. The creative side and the destructive side are the same process—‘every exit is but an entrance to somewhere else.’ But as civilization advances, the creation part occurs quicker and quicker, so that it becomes only destruction, as far as inherited community is concerned—to them, every entrance is but an exit. It is not so much that the created identities come-and-go too quickly to ever have the chance of evolving into inherited identities, though that is also broadly true, it is that elective identities spread so fast that all of them are everywhere at the same time.

And while this does not necessarily force civilization towards political liberalism, it does push it away from non-liberalism. (For record, I do think that the underlying nature of civilization probably does favor political liberalism, but certainly not as strongly and consistently as it disfavors political and social non-liberalism.) And so going forward we should expect the vast majority of non-liberal regimes to have short shelf-lives. It may be that when a given non-liberal regime falls, it is replaced by another non-liberal regime, but then that one will not last very long either, nor will the next, and on-and-on this goes. Liberalism is a fact of civilization, and it does not go away just because you stop believing in it. (snip)

Needless to say, White nationalism qualifies as weird. Whether it is a ‘petty’ nation-state or White Unionism, any White nationalism that would depend on a non self-selected population is asking for trouble. In that sense, both sides are equally wrong. If, by some series of unlikely turns, a kind of White Right is able to ‘take back America,’ or in a national-divorce scenario, a White nationalist-ish Red state America emerges, the smart money is that the regime isn’t going last very long. Expect a lifespan more comparable to that of Cromwell’s commonwealth than to Winthrop’s Massachusetts. The vicious hostility towards us by the powers-that-be adds insult to our injury, and of course we want to be out from under their thumb, but the ultimate problem is not ZOG or the GAE or the Cathedral or whatever name we would give this ugly regime. It is the much more basic and tragic fact of human life that social atomization is inherent to the process of civilization. You can replace the social superstructure with whatever you like, but that base of civilization is not going anywhere. The only and best way for an ethnostate to preserve itself is for it to be an elective ethnostate. (snip)

When it comes to actually attaining an ethnostate in the first place, there is no option available that qualifies as practical, not if practical means the obvious and easy solution. But relatively speaking, elective nationalism has the advantage here too. Yeah, the fact that it sounds silly at first blush is a barrier to entry, but over the long haul, it wears better than its rivals. Ultimately, it ‘makes sense’ in a way that simple petty nationalism and European Imperium simply don’t, and with greater exposure that should tell ever more. The other obvious barrier is the inherent burden elective nationalism places on the individual White nationalist. If the ethnostate comes, it’s not going to be where you live now; like the New World Puritans, you’re going to have to pick up stakes and move there. In the petty nationalist and Imperium scheme of things, you might have to move if you live in, say, California, but for the majority, the ethnostate will come to you. Naturally, this is more appealing to garden variety sympathizers. ‘I’m guess I’m kinda racist, so I’ll root for these guys.’ On the other hand, any kind of ‘Make America White Again’ nationalism is an existential threat to hundreds of millions of North Americans. That is the tradeoff: Petty nationalism/Imperium places an extreme burden on non White nationalists, whereas elective nationalism asks virtually no sacrifice of 99% of them. Largely as a result of this unavoidable fact, Make America White Again is deeply and irrevocably offensive to the moral sensibilities of any normal person. And frankly, for good reason. The process of making America White would be one of the most savage and bloody undertakings in human history. To be sure, the normal American would instinctively oppose the elective ethnostate too, because it is ‘racist,’ and therefore bad. But there’s bad, and then there’s bad. Whereas MAWA is something close to ultimate evil, elective ethnonationalism is simply a taboo opinion. After all, there really is no compelling moral argument against it on liberal-democratic grounds. Racist as it may be, it is pretty close to a victimless crime. And with the right argument, a victimless crime is no longer a crime at all.

The best way to think about long term prospects of achieving an ethnostate, is not to consider the ceiling of support, but the floor of opposition. In the case of MAWA, the absolute floor is probably most of the country—virtually every non-White, as well as tens of millions of Whites. For elective ethnonationalism, the floor is a small fraction of that—Antifa types, the most hardcore anti-White conspiracy theorists, and the most totalitarian-minded fringe of the Left. And the intensity of the opposition would be much greater against MAWA too. As I said, MAWA is a tangible existential threat to the everyday way of life of hundreds of millions of people. The elective ethnostate is an existential threat to only the small number who live in its future territory, but as I’ve said, they have not lost their country. It still exists, even if it no longer extends to where they happen to be standing. If they miss it so much, we would be happy to facilitate their return. The only tangible harm the elective ethnostate causes others is wounding the pride of Washington and/or Ottawa, and to stoke paranoia and resentment among the most extreme anti-White diehards. It’s not going to be easy either way, but assuming an equally competent and responsible movement in either scenario, an elective ethnonationalism that has 5% support is better placed to eventually achieve its end than a ‘Make America White Again’ movement that has fifty percent support.(Snip)

[Not to be too patronizing here, but most of our number do not seem to understand the nature of our movement. For the ‘conservative movement’ or the ‘progressive movement’ the goal of shifting the Overton Window makes sense. These are broad coalitions, and the existence of each side is highly relative to what’s happening on the other side. Ours is (or should be) a very different type of movement, one that is not relative to our opposition, but instead has a very specific goal in mind: the ethnostate. As a different type of movement than theirs, ours should operate differently. For a movement like ours, the vast bulk of our activity should be laser-focused on explaining three points: What we want, why we want it, and why it is right that we should have it.

I know this is separatist movement 101, but then, why aren’t we doing it more? Most people have no idea what we want, or our arguments for it. All they know is that we are unhappy with the current arrangement, probably because we are nasty bigots. It’s fine to complain about unfairness, but at the end, that’s not really the point. Irish nationalists didn’t spend all their time complaining that Britain was mean to them, or that it was unfair that Anglicanism was favored over Catholicism. They may have done that too, but the overriding focus of Irish nationalism was that they wanted their own state. Everyone on both sides was well aware that that was the ultimate issue. So it should be with us.]

[Greg Johnson’s argument against the Imperiumist claim that only the Imperial hegemon is sovereign was thorough enough that I do not feel the need to include my own. Suffice to say, national sovereignty is not a black and white issue, but exists as a spectrum. Britain is more sovereign than Spain, and Spain is more sovereign than Slovakia (in capability, if not in practice). Speaking of capability vs practice, the spectrum is not only a one of relative power, but of relative priorities. All else being equal, the greater the priority one gives to an issue, the more sovereign he is over the matter. For that reason, the elective nation-state is relatively much more sovereign than a non-elective state having the same material measure of power. I share the concern of Imperiumists who question the long-term viability of the nationalist policies of states like Denmark, Poland, and Hungary. But their vulnerability is almost entirely a function of the fact that they are not elective nations. Large portions of those states’ populations are hostile or indifferent to their governments’ (relatively) nationalist policies. And a great many of the rest might be swayed away from their nationalist sympathies at the least inconvenience. Economic sanctions and state department/NGO shenanigans can work in those places, but they do not work against elective states.]

In the beginning, liberalism was the individual asserting the superiority of his will against against the dictates of monotheism’s ‘objective’ morality. To justify that end, he accomplished what was thought impossible—he created a moral system superior to God’s Law. Once again, we are called to think our way around a supposed law of the universe. This time, the law in our way is the inherent nature of civilization. And the way around it is to bring the liberal revolution to its most far-sighted conclusion, and to what is also the most far-sighted conclusion of civilization itself. The first time around, the law in our way was wholly a phantom of our imagination, and our task was only to put a truer story in its place. Now, our task is to write that story’s perfect ending. (snip)

Just as the Industrial Revolution was not a discrete period of history, but a process that continues on and on, so the Protestant Reformation has never ended either. And the reason in both cases is the same: that is how civilization works. Liberalism—the ideology of civilization—was the solution to the Protestant Reformation the first time, and it is the solution again, and always forever. (Snip)

As much as liberalism arose together with fundamentalist Christianity, and as it did, expressed itself through the Christian language of egalitarian acceptance, the idea in itself is a striking overthrow of Christianity’s universalist egalitarianism, and indeed, is the most impressive moral achievement and assertion of will in the history of the human race. We should be proud that it was accomplished by our race. We beat God at His own Game; yes, any sound morality is universal, God is right about that, which is why we walked into His nihilistic trap in the first place, so to escape we created a morality every bit as universal as His, but which at the same time is profoundly anti-universal. Liberalism runs with Christianity’s universal morality, and yet reverses it completely by making every individual sovereign. It pulls off this astonishing trick because in its simple ideological formulation it comprehends all sides of Man’s spirit. It is at once egalitarian and inegalitarian, is both individualistic and communitarian, and it is all this without the slightest break in its logical consistency. Miraculously, this consistency is not gained by compromising on any of these points, but by riding each to their most radical conclusion. With Christianity, as with most ideologies, one side—often a primitive and/or timid side—of Man rides roughshod over the rest. At root, the Greek Way awes us because it amounted to a barbaric form of liberalism. For 2,000 years, our ancestors endured mind-dumbing “orders� of one sort or another, the first 1,000 years a Roman social order, then another 1,000 under a Roman spiritual order, before the mediocre empire finally died and the sovereign individual was reborn. Gradually, The Pale Genius devised an exodus from this shadow life. He dares to realize that that the ultimate morality is not conformity to some law above himself, but to one he works out within himself. And realizing the ultimate Goodness in himself, he extends the curtesy to his fellows, thus the interests of the individual, above all the interest of the individual to perpetuate himself, based on a law within himself, is the universal law. (snip)

The Vinland Saga. The ancient Jews’ origin story is easily the best in the genre because the founding myth they crafted is both a hyper-tribalistic glorification of themselves and a universalistic moral vision of world-historical significance. The trick of harmonizing these two elements into one narrative is damn-near the nationalist’s Holy Grail. Not to say they executed it perfectly. At one level, it can be said that the Jews’ position is roughly analogous to that of the American Founding Fathers: their ideal represented a moral advancement, but they hoarded those gains for themselves. Sure enough, they were supplanted by a more thoroughgoing universalism. But not entirely. The Anglo-Americans’ liberal narrative—liberalism as they conceived it, not liberalism in its fullest—is a simple contradiction of tribalism, and the tribalism gave way. It is telling that their most common communitarian argument is not that ethnic homogeneity is a categorical good, but that it is required to maintain a liberal order. (Civilization tends to wash away the unselected tribe regardless, but the Anglo-American ideal serves to bless that process, not resist or counter it.) The liberal exceptionalism of British and American history followed a very straightforward, almost Marxian, trajectory: The nation, in following its own morals to their logical conclusion, gradually supplants itself. The Jews did not succumb to that fate. The fact that the new God was not only a more consistent universalism, but also a living, breathing, Jewish theologian may have helped them there, though that has been problematic for them in other ways. But their real genius (as far as I am concerned) was to make their universalistic moral vision and their extreme nationalism into one inseparable narrative.

The destiny of White nationalists must be to meet and exceed the standard set by the Jews. The White race has already conceived the greatest moral ideal of all: Liberalism. And as the hand of history would have it, White nationalists are singularly placed to develop that ideal to its full ideological potential. That having now been accomplished, it is incumbent on us to use that knowledge to harness the forces arrayed against our survival, and redirect them to serve our ends. Hard-pressed as we are, we are at the same time uniquely blessed by history that we are positioned to realize its ideological end, and to found our nation on that rock.

This is all to say that we have an awesome opportunity before us. It would be a savage mistake to waste it attempting to preserve an Amerikaner redoubt, or on some flailing effort to forge a sort of synthetic White China, or on any other unimaginative conservatism or reactionary rear-guard action. We are the descendants of the originators of liberal individualism, and if we want to save that race, it is our duty to save it in a form that is worthy of its history, advances that history. Our ideology must be that individualism and nationalism should be made together flawless, and our sought-for nation-state should be a flawless embodiment of that ideal. Our people have had an impressive history to this point, especially philosophically, but that history is not what legitimizes our elective ethnostate, but it is the other way around. Our elective ethnostate is the complete realization of our ancestors’ moral revolution. It should represent nothing less than our people and our idea brought together, made one and the same in a perfect final form, the historical culmination of the past five centuries of our grand ideology’s rise, on account of which our race discovered itself and the world.

While the ancient Hebrews combined universalism and nationalism successfully, their narrative is crude from both sides. Their universalism was only the egalitarian yearnings of a people in distress, coupled with a power fantasy. And their nationalism was pretty much the same thing. I guess that is why it works at some level, but it only works to a religious mind. The true spirit of nationalism—that of the nation determining its own good—is not there because that is a fundamentally secular worldview (nationalistic feeling is found in religions, including Judaism, but it is inevitably imprecise; it can be so much better). Their narrative was crude because its two sides were put together not by reason, but by religion. Elective White nationalism on the other hand, is a product of reason. As the true inheritors of liberalism, we do recognize that any sound morality has a universalistic frame. As liberals, the truest and most far-sighted liberals, we determine that the individual has a right to perpetuate himself on his terms, so far as it is consistent for all others to have the same. This logic, as the reader now knows, culminates in the elective nation. Elective nationalism is the understanding that universalism requires individualism, and individualism requires nationalism.

So if the concept of a nationalism of the individual appears as merely giving the name of nationalism to the phenomenon of individualism, it is that, but it is also to give the name of individualism to the phenomenon of nationalism. In long view, universalism, individualism, and nationalism are all entirely the same thing from top to bottom. This concept of nationalism does leave the fate of the nation to the whims of individual preference, but for the same reason it also protects the nation from the whims of the individual, and more surely than ever before.

From its beginning, White nationalism has always been implicitly elective nationalist in its thought and basis. It is just that this basis did not have a name. Meanwhile, the history of liberalism is that of the White race liberating humanity from the tyranny of a monotheistic Objective Good. Whatever else for which liberalism gets the credit or blame, that is its Big Idea, and what makes it the most subtle and brilliant moral revolution in world history. And properly realized, liberalism’s formulation of individualism is implicitly nationalistic. If the liberal concept of individualism is to be more than a talking-point in favor of greater immediate individual license, but is also taken to support a farsighted sovereignty of the individual against the imposition of others, then the elective nation-state is the logical conclusion. Elective nationalism is happy to be of help to any and all sincere nationalists in need. Of course, White nationalists are among those most in need of elective nationalism, and as they are already functionally elective nationalist, it is natural that they should be at the vanguard. One might imagine that elective nationalism’s ultimate logic is on the side of eccentrically-conceived microstates, but while I don’t begrudge them their fun, that is not its ultimate logic. Its ultimate logic is that the nation can go home again. Elective nationalism’s accomplishment is to recreate the inherited nation in a fashion that secures it against the forces of elective identity, it is to use untamed civilization’s energy against itself, all the better to tame it.

My claim that White nationalism has always been, roughly, an elective nationalist idea probably sounds strange to many because the term is so often used interchangeably with any White Identitarianism, when it should be understood as a (more purposeful) subset of it. White nationalism is a much stricter conception; its minimum requirements are 1.) The paramount and ultimate purpose of state is that it is a White state, and 2.) a Whites-only immigration policy. White nationalism then is a fairly new idea, emerging only in the last half century or so. And while the term ‘White identitarian’ is (as far as I know) is a still-more-recent creation, many of the behaviors and beliefs associated with it go back centuries. The US, for instance, was never a White nationalist state. In retrospect, we can say that it was a White identitarian society, and/or a White supremacist state to varying degrees based on region, but it never met either of White nationalism’s two requirements. It was simply a state that happened to have a White majority, and on account of that, the government and the people thought of theirs as a White country. Or rather, it was a country that was White. Whiteness was only one of many elements that constituted their identity. Of course, most American Whites approved of their majority, and, if asked, most would have claimed to favor a policy to keep that majority in place, but the issue was not given much great attention. One might counter that they took their majority for granted as a social good, and as agreement on this point was so broad, there was no need to spell-it-out to the last detail. Okay, but the medievals took the social good of Christianity for granted too, and that did not stop them. Many on our side are fond of pointing to the original naturalization act of 1790, but what stands out to the White nationalist is is just how non-comprehensive it was. It was an extremely narrowly-focused law. It solely specified which immigrants were eligible to acquire citizenship—‘free white persons of good moral character.’ At no point in American history was immigration limited to Whites-only, nor ever was citizenship. Yes, there was the Chinese exclusion act, the immigration legislation of 1924, and, well, that’s about it. And even these measures were amazingly feeble. It wasn’t the non-White exclusion act, it was only the Chinese exclusion act. Why? Because it was a purely reactionary measure to Chinese immigration to the west coast. Likewise, the immigration acts of 1921-24 were a reactionary response to high rates of southern and eastern European (and to a lesser extent Asian) immigration. No quotas whatsoever were placed on immigration from Africa or Latin America. In fact, the explicit allowance of immigration from Africa has been US law since 1870. Whatever Honest Abe may have once said to a group of freed slaves, the actual legislation to come out of the reconstruction era was to expressly allow for the immigration of Blacks into the US, not out of it. America was never a White nationalist country. The fact that the word ‘White’ does not come up once in the constitution should have tipped you off to that. You might be thinking, ‘Well, they did have a sense of White identity, they just weren’t weird about it.’ Right. They were not weird about it. White nationalists are weird about it. This does not mean we have to be stupid and oppressive about it, policing the individual’s every move for hints of racial disloyalty, interfering in his personal business and hobbies. In fact, we can be more liberal than the liberals on many matters. But we must be uncompromising weirdos on the question of what defines the nation-state.

This is not say that America has been a complete waste of time. The Americanist project is the (ultimately self-defeating) liberation of the individual from any radical group identity. Taking a wider sociological view, the elective nationalist reads this project against itself. Where the Americanist views the demise of inherited identities as in itself the triumph of individualism, the elective nationalist understands that the demise of inherited identity is also the rise of elective identity, which, to the civilized man, is prelude to the true liberation of the individual—the advent of elective nationalism. Radical group identity returns, reborn by way of its supposed death. Now synonymous with individualism, the nation-state is more thoroughly, uncompromisingly identitarian and communitarian than ever before. White identity has a special role in this historical dialectic. It has always been a parallel track running alongside Americanism, its opposite, but also its creation, a post-American child of the American experience.

The epic of our race’s self-discovery is part-and-parcel with the Age of Discovery, and above any other country by far, Americans get credit for the discovery of the White race. [Richard] Spencer once characterized his project as ‘raising consciousness.’ In the grand scheme, the history of The New World is the development of just such a consciousness, culminating in the formation of a White nationalist Elect. In the Americanist narrative of overcoming radical group identity, race obviously takes pride of place. For the callow masses, the significance of American history is the gradual widening of the notion of ‘us,’ the merger of WASPs and White ethnics into a general White American identity, and this overlapping with the erosion of White identity into an ever-more universalist American identity. In proto-elective nationalist fashion, the White nationalist reads this history against itself. For him, the significance of the diversity and dislocation of the American experience is that it allowed us to realize a more precise definition of ‘us.’ It is not that we are conservatives who concede the loss of our ethnic peculiarities, but want to pause the tape at White identity; it is that we now understand, not just in theory, but in practice, that race is the most essential aspect of the ethnicity, the only truly essential aspect. And we would now apply this realization about ethnicity to defining our nation, and constructing its state. In America, the power of unselected civilization to destroy community was compressed into an intensely concentrated form, and our people are the elect among the masses who made it to the other side, inoculated by the ordeal we endured to become a nation.

As far as I am aware, this historical narrative has been the assumed starting point of White nationalism for as long as there has been a word for it. Not to say that White nationalism has always been sufficiently conscious of the world-historical currents that brought it into being, or that its ideology has been consistently aligned to any deep theory of individualism; usually not so. But in practice, the White nationalist’s goal has always been to abstract his nation from the larger American empire. And to arrange a new state for his elect in the Pacific Northwest, or Alaska, or the Mountain West, or northern New England and/or the maritimes. Or Newfoundland. Others have been less realistic in their aims, but White nationalists have always assumed as given that they are separate from most of White America; it has never been about ‘taking back America.’ White nationalism has always been an elective nationalism because it has always had to be. My purpose is to make White nationalism self-conscious of this elective nationalist basis…and self-conscious of its historical role.

The Age of Discovery, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Age of Liberalism are inextricably bound together, and form the same story. All three elements of this story conspired to bring forth two seemingly contradictory ideals/realizations: a dramatic expansion of individualism, as a fact and an ideal; and the discovery and development of White racial identity. The ideal of the elective ethnostate is the resolution and harmonization of these seeming contraries; not only can they peaceably coexist, but they must cohere together for the ultimate realization of either.

Perhaps the most vital mantra of this book is that liberalism is what you make of it. That is my ideological conviction outside of all time and tradition, but it is also the history of the great idea in action. Namely, sometimes it is nationalistic, sometimes it is not. The Anglo liberal tradition arises in response to religious and economic diversity, and admittedly, the nationalistic spirit is not much in evidence in their liberal thought—their thought has been stuck in primitive-stage liberalism from start to finish. In the French-continental school however, a nationalistic strain in their liberal thought is very much present. Yes, in certain continental contexts nationalism was a relative cosmopolitanism of its day, but that is not the full explanation. In France especially, there were liberal thinkers who explicitly identified the nation as an extension of the individual’s will, as an extension of the individual himself, and therefore understood the nation as the necessary end of individualism. The French Revolution was far closer to a mass populist uprising than anything experienced in the Anglo World, and the fact that so many of the revolutionaries were anti-Christian is a large part of their happier story. To this day, the French population is the most ethnonationalistic of the great Western nations.

Naturally, the French story is not as happy as we would have it. For a true happy ending, that end must be an elective ethnostate. The French’s historical circumstances shaped them to understand depths of liberalism that the Anglo did not recognize. But they still did not know it so completely as we do. They remained attached to the inherited nation, where we realize the necessity of the elective nation. Individualism and nationalism are spiritual kin, aiming at the same end—the best of French liberals got that right—but inherited nationalism is ideologically incompatible with individualism, and empirically incompatible with civilization. Romanticism’s exultation of both individualism and organic community was a budding contradiction for the same reason. As long as the nation is inherited rather than elected, then any honest ideologue must eventually be forced to choose between individualism and nationalism, and by that point, he’s lost either way. Whichever way he chooses, the impersonal process of civilization will override his choice. Individualism is inevitable, and in a non-self-selected population, this will wash away the nation, and any other nation that may arise in its place, meaning that it is ultimately washing away any far-sighted individualism. This empirical truth of individualism and nationalism amounts to the same as its ideological truth; the two must be together for the realization of either.

Pressed by the urgency of our circumstances, we are required to understand what past generations could not know, or could afford to remain ignorant. Our race’s situation is more dire than any our liberal ancestors faced in their five-century history, but the elemental nature of the struggle is the same. Liberalism is what you make of it, but its indispensable essence is some assertion of the right of the individual against the world. The liberal says that the individual should decide for himself, ‘Who am I, really?’ and therefore, ‘What should be my highest end?’ That settled, the individual’s ability to assert this right against the world requires he be joined by a larger institutional collective whose law is the assertion of whatever self-decided right brought the individual to its company. Our ancestors came together to assert their rights in favor of free speech and thought, and against religious coercion, arbitrary and unjust authority, and myriad other affronts against their sovereignty. At the beginning of it all was the profound moral revolution against submission to the notion of a monotheistic objective Good, that instead morality is self-determined by the individual. However sublimated this ethos was by the practical limitations and exigencies of the day, that was the heart and soul of the idea. In the long run, perhaps we should be glad that liberalism was born against the constraints of Christian morality or it might have been deformed into an ugly and simplistic might-is-right doctrine. Faced against a worthy adversary, the individual was forced to create an even better moral basis to justify his Will. This transvaluation of morality was, and remains, the greatest accomplishment in the history of Man. But the stakes are even higher now. Whereas the practical implication of their struggle to assert the sovereignty of the individual against the world was only to remove themselves from civil oppression, ours is a fight is to reverse civilization’s cold mechanical march against our bare survival. Adding insult to injury, the individualist morality gifted to us by our ancestors appears at first glance to be a hinderance to resolving our predicament. But as the dying patient whose life flashes before his mind’s eye, at the last moment we understand the meaning of our race. Or better, we resolve to determine that meaning for ourselves. And once again, staring down the apparent laws of universe that would destroy our liberty, as did our ancestors before us, we find a way to turn those same laws against themselves, and into a tool of our Will. In one precise motion, we will effect a transvaluation of civilization itself, and end at the harmonious realization of our people and our idea together as one perfect Will. And we will survive our ordeal after all; in fact, we will be born again. (Snip)