The Trappings of Right Wing Culturalism 

Richard Hoste

January 2, 2010

In his book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, John Derbyshire lists three ways of looking at the world, making clear his preferences are with the third: religion, culturalism, and biologism.  The religious viewpoint posits that mankind and what happens to it are the product of divine will. Culturalism proposes that differences between human groups are the result of differences  in (vaguely defined) "culture" (or sometimes determined by geographical accidents like in Jared Diamond’s works). Biologism sees the world through the lens of an underlying human nature and biological differences between groups.  

While most educated people eschew the religious outlook, mainstream intellectual debate in the West is between different kinds of culturalism.  On the Left are the most extreme peddlers of White guilt.  This seems to be a deformed version of the old Marxist view that says that those who are successful got to be wealthy or even middle class through the exploitation of others.  What gives the contemporary anti-White movement a more culturalist feel is the idea that the races currently doing the oppressing are or were arbitrarily chosen at some point.  On college campuses, both class and race grievances are alive and well.  

The mainstream Right favors a kind of conservative culturalism which has seduced many a White Nationalist.  Rather than the West’s success being based on malevolence it comes from a set of positive cultural values that other races would do well to adopt.  When Dinesh D’Souza wanted to defend Whites against charges of systematic racism while at the same time refuting us believers in race differences in intelligence, he pointed to migrants from the Caribbean coming to America and outperforming our indigenous Blacks.  Unfortunately for him by the second generation this so-called model minority begins to approach African American norms. 

Right-wing culturalism is not totally false.  Uruguay remains a very poor country despite being about 90% White.  Ukraine’s GDP per capita is below even some African countries.  But for seeing the general scope of history and present day realities, the White/Asian > everyone else > Black trichotomy of differing biological abilities works extremely well in predicting success or failure (using the terms by the standard of what humans universally desire; see this article for a philosophical defense).  There’s no factor that can better predict where a people will end up than biological descent.  Openness to capitalism is probably a distant second.  

White nationalists and others who are partial to biologism may support many of the same policies of Right-wing culturalists, who they might believe are even “really” on their side.  Since racially conscious Whites don’t want to be told that they’re responsible for everyone else’s problems, they find the kind of culturalism that flatters them appealing. But when Right-wing culturalism excludes biologism from public debate it can become even more dangerous than its Leftist counterpart.  

The Assimilation Menace

Many Right-wing culturalists join White Nationalists in opposing immigration.  To the extent that anybody works towards that goal — and here I reluctantly include feminists worrying about “women’s rights" — they should be supported.

But what policy should the US government take towards the Mexicans already in America?  An issue that raged during the 1990s was that of bilingual education.  Hispanic children were being taught in Spanish and thus prevented from assimilating into the mainstream American culture.  In 1998 Proposition 227 passed in California and largely required students to be taught in English.  Opponents of the measure wrote books with titles like At War with Diversity and the professional race mongerers threw a fit.  Heather MacDonald recently wrote in City Journal that Proposition 227 was a success in "[removing] a significant barrier to Hispanic assimilation." She further explains, 

The early Chicano activists sought the “replacement of assimilationist ideals . . . with cultural pluralism,” writes University of Houston history professor Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr. in his book Contested Policy. Bilingual education was the activists’ primary weapon in fighting assimilation because, as they rightly understood, English-language teaching is a powerful tool for encouraging assimilation.

While our first instincts may be to cheer whenever a multiculturalist activist is in pain, if we use our brains, we racialists must part ways with the Right-wing culturalists on the issue of assimilation.

This goes back to our reasons for opposing immigration in the first place.  Hispanics are a bad fit for America not because they have the wrong values or are putty in the hands of Leftist activists, as some mainstream conservatives may argue.  They simply as a group don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.  Adding Mexicans means the education system suffers, inequalities grow, crime rises and the quality of the culture declines.  This happens no matter what language they speak or what kind of religion they follow.  The relatively culturally confident Whites in Texas may be managing a large Latino population better than those in California, but eventually the number of Mexicans will simply overwhelm the Caucasians of either state.  The ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.  If that’s going to happen, we need to hope for bad relations between them and Whites.  Not speaking English makes Americans dislike immigrants.  

Many White Nationalists support an ethnostate and would be happy to give some US territory to non-Whites in order to insure there own race’s survival.  The more the different racial groups in America share a common language and culture, the less likely such a scenario is going to be.  Left-wing activists that can make NAMs hostile to White culture are doing half the work for us.  

If White Americans do have to permanently live under the same government as NAMs, it’s almost inevitable that the latter will push for policies that hurt European Americans such as more affirmative action and income redistribution.  Learning to speak English will only make them better activists.  To a Right-wing culturalist the fact that Hispanics vote Democrat is regrettable but can be changed.  Those of us who understand biologism know better.  If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist.

If we want to see what assimilation can do, look no further than Latin America.   South America had 1,500 languages when Europeans first came in contact with the land.  The Heather MacDonalds and Dinesh D’Souzas of Catholic Spain surely favored teaching the Indians Spanish and converting them to Christianity.  That’s precisely what happened.  But race conflict in Latin America never went away (see this video of affirmative action in Brazil, a country traditionally pointed to as an un-racist nation) and anything approaching first world living standards only formed in White countries and regions.  Had the European settlers separated themselves from the Indians by cultural barriers they would’ve intermarried less with them and there presumably would be more White oases today.  

Modern Anglo-American conservatives are the Spanish priests of today who thought they were doing their posterity a great service by making the Indians more like themselves.  Greg Johnson recently summed up the fundamental difference between us and Right-wing culturalists.    

The Tea Partiers constantly invoke the US Constitution, but they have a largely mistaken view of its nature and its relationship to the American people. The Constitution did not create the American people, the American people created the Constitution.

Sign of the Times: Even Soccer Hooligans Are Anti-Racist

A recent story about a group of anti-Muslim activists in Britain that call themselves the English Defense League underscores my point.  

On Platform One at Bolton station a mob of around 100 men punch the air in unison. The chant goes up: “Muslim bombers, off our streets, Muslim bombers off our streets....”

Their voices echo loudly and more men suddenly appear; startled passengers move aside. The group march forward waving St George Cross flags and holding up placards. The throng of men around me applaud. A train heading for Glasgow draws up on the opposite platform and the men turn as one, bursting into song: “Engelaand, Engelaand, Engelaand.” …

The rise of the English Defence League has been rapid. Since its formation at the start of the summer the group has organised nearly 20 major protests in Britain's cities, including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Luton, Nottingham, Glasgow and Swansea.

Like the American speak-English movement, at first glance a White Nationalist can be fooled into thinking that this organization shares many of his values.  But then we get this:

As the EDL gains support across the UK, Muslims have already been targeted in unprovoked attacks. In the worst incident, a mob of 30 white and black youths is said to have surrounded Asian students near City University in central London and attacked them with metal poles, bricks and sticks while shouting racist abuse...

The group's self-proclaimed leader, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, did most of the talking. A father of two, Robinson explained the background to the rise of the movement.

“For more than a decade now there's been tension in Luton between Muslim youths and whites. We all get on fine —black, white, Indian, Chinese. ...  Everyone does, in fact, apart from these Muslim youths who've become extremely radicalised since the first Gulf War. This is because preachers of hate live in Luton and have been recruiting for radical Islamist groups for years. Our Government does nothing about them so we decided that we'd start protesting.”

First, there’s the following message that one gets before registering to join the group’s forum.

The English Defence League is not a racist organisation. We have mixed race members, and will not tolerate racist comments.

Please do not join if you have misunderstood this in any way.

And just so we really get it, in the FAQ section they write the following in a sentence that could’ve come from Tim Wise’s website:

We take an actively anti-racist (emphasis added) and anti-fascist stance.

The organization’s home page includes a picture of two Blacks.  Those who watched the Tea Party documentary will have seen the same sickening spectacle before.  

Anti-racists against Islam, or the EDL

Robinson, the the EDL’s leader, explains when he decided to form the organization.  

Robinson could barely conceal his anger as he explained that the spark for him had been the sight of radical Muslims protesting when soldiers paraded through the town on their regiment's return from Afghanistan in May.

While a White patriot may not appreciate the site of immigrants protesting British soldiers, he should be rallying against any government that involves itself in the Middle East’s wars.

Like the BNP, the EDL is also attempting to ingratiate itself with Jews — to no avail. A couple months ago a controversy erupted over the EDL trying to use an Israeli flag at one of their rallies.  

An Israeli Embassy spokesperson said: “It is appalling to see the flag of Israel abused by thugs who stir up violence and tension between communities. Israel’s flag is a symbol of the 2000 year struggle of the Jewish people against racism and should not be manipulated by racists or extremists of any kind.”

Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish Chronicle, has attacked the EDL as "racists and extremists" and claims that mainstream Islam is "no more of a threat to Western society than the Quakers." Strange times we live in when an organization that actively fights a positive White identity while supporting a Jewish ethnostate gets branded by the Israelis  and Jewish activists as racist!

Too pro-White for the Israelis, “actively anti-racist” according to their website

I don’t mean to make the reader needlessly pessimistic.  There are organizations in every White country that deserve our support: political parties like the BNP in England, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, and Rodina in Russia, along with of course magazines and journals like The Occidental Observer, American Renaissance and The Occidental Quarterly.  I’m not even opposed to alliances with mainstream conservatives, as long as they do the things that are important to us and we’ve thought long and hard over whether their policies are good for Whites. 

But to blindly support the Right because you think defending the West’s culture or religion is “close enough” to speaking up for the race that created them is a dead end. The Left may even be more useful for White survival.  

Ron Unz was the software developer who funded California’s Proposition 227. In his 2000 article in the neo-conservative American Enterprise journal he gushed over the fact the intermarriage rate between Whites and non-Black minorities was so high in California.  While liberals may lie and tell us that the White race doesn’t exist, conservatives are out in front with the most effective plans to make that a reality.  

Like the EDL, Unz doesn’t hide where he stands.  Nipping White nationalism in the bud is behind his assimiliationist goals.  Unz wrote:

A future America in which both whites and all other ethnic groups see themselves as minorities will be far different from our traditional majority-white/minority-black society. Since the 1960's, the deepening ideological decay of the American melting pot, especially among the journalists and intellectuals who shape our thoughts, has transformed our official self-image from that of a nation of individuals living in a common culture into that of a nation of groups arrayed against one another in an ethnic spoils system. Multiculturalism and "diversity" thoroughly dominate our nation's schools and politics and public discourse, encouraging minorities to exercise influence through the mobilization of ethnic or racial grievance. Under this framework, the rise of a similar ethnic-grievance movement among America's emerging white minority is likely, perhaps inevitable.

Already there are early warning signs of such a movement. Public schools are reporting interest in white student clubs, and white firefighters associations and European-American pressure groups are forming in California. Although so far these developments and others like them are minuscule, and the individuals involved make every effort to avoid even a hint of extremism, evolving white-bloc politics could eventually develop a white-nationalist orientation or fringe. Elements of white nationalism have been the unspoken subtext behind the rise of extremist militia groups and the appearance of populist third parties, and represented the obvious core of the anti-immigration movement of the mid-90's. ...

There are few forces that could so easily break America as the coming of white nationalism.

But he’s wrong.  Immigration has already broken America.  White nationalism is the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.  All movements and ideologies must be judged from the perspective of what they contribute to the odds of bringing it about. 

Richard Hoste (email him) writes on race, immigration, political correctness and modern conservatism.  His articles have appeared at VDARE.com, The Occidental Observer, The Occidental Quarterly and TakiMag among other places.  His blog is HBD Books, where he regularly reviews classic and modern works on these topics.