Roger Scruton’s “The Rebirth of Nations”

Roger Scruton is familiar to TOO readers for his starring role in Brenton Sanderson’s wonderful series, The War on the English (see here and here). Scruton’s comments on the destruction of the English quoted by Sanderson are well worth re-reading.

Scruton recently published an article in The American Spectator that summarizes some of the successes of nationalist parties in Europe and the deep disillusionment with immigration, multiculturalism and the European Union (“The Rebirth of Nations“). It is a very heartening article with some familiar themes, particularly the point that this has been a top-down, anti-democratic revolution. The elites have systematically stifled nationalist sentiments, but these sentiments are once again “prominent in the cultural landscape of Europe. And they are the more prominent for the attempt by the Eurocrats to forbid them.”

It is not a direction that the people of Europe have chosen, and every time they are given the right to vote on it they reject it — hence everything is done to ensure that they never have the chance to vote on it. The process is moving always toward centralization, top-down control, dictatorship by unelected bureaucrats and judges, cancellation of laws passed by elected parliaments, constitutional treaties framed without any input whatsoever from the people — in short, the process is moving always toward imperial government. And only one thing stands opposed to this result, and that is the national sentiments of the European people.

For this very reason national sentiments have been demonized. Speak up for Jeanne d’Arc and le pays réel, for the “sceptred isle” and St. George, for Lemmenkäinen’s gloomy forests and the “true Finns” who roam in them, and you will be called a fascist, a racist, and an extremist. There is a liturgy of denunciation here that is repeated all across Europe by a ruling elite that trembles in the face of ordinary loyalties. But the fact is that national sentiment is, for most ordinary Europeans, the only motive that will justify sacrifice in the public cause. Insofar as people do not vote to line their own pockets, it is because they also vote to protect a shared identity from the predations of those who do not belong to it, and who are attempting to pillage an inheritance to which they are not entitled….

This systematic attempt to destroy national cultures has coincided with promotion of multiculturalism:

This cult is painfully apparent in England, where I am writing. English schools that refuse to celebrate Christmas will nevertheless insist on a day devoted to Diwali and another to Eid; “diversity” is the theme of our official festivals, and the Arts Council of England even refuses to support the English Music Festival, on account of the offensive word English in its title. At the same time, here as elsewhere in Europe, people no longer accept the cult. All across Europe “multiculturalism” is being rejected, both by ordinary people and by many of their elected representatives. For, while multiculturalism has done nothing to reconcile immigrant communities to their new surroundings, it has destroyed the frail remnants of national cultures that survived the Second World War.

The same processes of elite dominance in opposition to popular sentiments are at work in the U.S.—the same campaigns to vilify ordinary adaptive human feelings as “racist” or “extremist”; the same tendencies to nullify popular sentiments on immigration and multiculturalism by overruling them by institutions, such as the federal courts, that are only weakly responsive to public opinion (here’s a recent case of a federal judge blocking parts of a Georgia law on illegal immigration); the same suppression of discussion of critical issues that will shape the future of the country, particularly legal immigration, not to mention issues like Jewish influence on American elites.

But we in Americas are light-years from the political progress that the Europeans have achieved in bringing the Leviathan to its knees. No doubt this has a great deal to do with Europeans having a stronger sense of national culture and historical roots going back millennia. Too, unlike the European systems, the American political system is designed to prevent small parties from having any representation in government.

The best hope for America is the success of the nationalist movements in Europe. Indeed, if one nationalist movement is successful in rejecting the EU and beginning the process of repatriating immigrants and tearing down multiculturalism, I think it would spread like wildfire to other nations traditionally dominated by Whites, including America.  Reading Scruton, I am more hopeful than ever that that time is near.