Organizing in the Face of Adversity: Lessons from History—Part One: The Pre-Civil War Theory of States Rights

The most pressing problem that our movement faces is that of organization. It is absolutely imperative that White advocates begin to geographically concentrate and procreate; we must reverse the White fertility crisis. Not only is there physical strength in numbers, but spiritual strength; if we can build continuous communities, the social ostracism that we are tormented with would dissolve away and lose its sting. No longer would we be vulnerable in isolation, ripe for the picking. No longer would we be browbeaten, told that we are the root of all evil. The twin scourges of opioids, responsible for 770,000 deaths in less than a decade, and suicide, up forty percent in seventeen years, might finally subside and fade away. Our enemies know this; Virginia Democrats are in the process of ensuring that no White neighborhoods will be allowed. Gregory Hood’s proposal of a White Tithe could go far in building our capacity to congregate. —

Yet when we contemplate the problem of organization, it can appear insurmountable. For example, as Samuel Francis has pointed out, are we really willing to surrender any of the physical integrity of our country? It seems clear that we already are territorially compromised; California and the Southwest have essentially been subsumed into Aztlan. Ignoring the litany of practical obstacles to the establishment of our ethnostate, we must remember the fate of the Confederate States of America. While we do not desire violence in any form, it certainly seems safe to say that a White ethnostate will not be established without violence, and that even if this were accomplished peacefully, the enemy would not, in fact could not, abide our existence. But how can we even begin to organize in the strength necessary to build physical communities? Our movement should be immune to O’Sullivan’s law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” But how can we avoid the inevitable infiltration and entrapment (see the film The Standoff at Sparrow Creek)? I propose no solutions here, but merely hope to inspire practical meditation and discussion.

Not all is dark; we have much to give us hope. Leftism is a castle of sand, a house of cards that must eventually collapse under the inexorably expanding weight of its contradictions with objective reality. Our people are awakening; they are not yet necessarily pro-White, but they are anti-anti-White. As our enemies drop their masks further and further, as their cries grow shriller, and as the consequences of “minority” rule worsen, greater numbers of our people will take their stand. As our forever wars in the Middle East continue, as our military becomes ever more clearly a mercenary force for Israel and international finance, consciousness of the Jewish Question will take deeper root. Each lie that we expose begs the question, “What else have I been lied to about?” The election of President Donald Trump and the spontaneous Trump rally chant of “send her back” are certainly clear expressions of White identity. Yet even in this hope, we must debate the merits and demerits of accelerationism; if we are going to take our stand, shouldn’t it be sooner rather than later, so that there are still enough of us left to claim victory, let alone survive?

I am inclined to the conclusion that 2016 was our last chance at a political solution within the current system. The massive (and unabated) demographic invasion, alongside the many concurrent proposals to expand the electorate and impose majoritarian democracy, make it increasingly unlikely that Whites have a future within the electoral system. If a critical mass of our people comes to believe that the outcomes of elections do not matter, that we are cornered into our final refuge, that there is no hope left within the political system, we can be sure to expect a sharp increase in public violence. In fact, our nation is already on an inexorable path toward increased political violence as the demographic situation deteriorates. However, a variety of peaceful political strategies may still remain for us, not the least of which are devolution and, if need be, secession. Secession, however, must be race-based and enforced. With the right leaders, we may still assert the doctrine of interposition, nullification, and state sovereignty against the tyrannical kritarchy and administrative state that currently reigns in our nation. The doctrine of states’ rights and reserved sovereignty is clearly set forth throughout the entire structure of the Constitution, as well as specifically manifested in the Tenth Amendment, but it is elucidated further in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1789, written in response to the (eerily reminiscent of the modern American Left) Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Theory of States’ Rights in Antebellum America

The Virginia Resolution, written by James Madison, an author of the Constitution, aptly describes the nature of our constitutional republic: “…the powers of the federal government [result] from the compact, to which the states are parties…[and are] no further valid [than] that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them. …A spirit has…been manifested by the federal government, to enlarge its powers by forced constructions of the constitutional charter which defines them…so as to destroy the meaning and effect, of the particular enumeration…and so as to consolidate the states by degrees, into one sovereignty, the obvious tendency and inevitable consequence of which would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States, into…a monarchy.”

In the Kentucky Resolution, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence (which was eventually distorted by Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to announce the American Founding as a singular United States, rather than a compact of plural independent States), carries the doctrine further: “if those who administer the general government be permitted to transgress the limits fixed by that compact, by a total disregard to the special delegations of power therein contained, annihilation of the state governments, and the erection upon their ruins, of a general consolidated government, will be the inevitable consequence. … The several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.”

South Carolinian Senator John C. Calhoun, however, most fully expounded upon the doctrine. In his second speech on the admission of the state of Michigan in 1837, Calhoun beautifully explains his position, careful to distinguish between nullification and anarchical revolution: “Because I am conservative I am a State rights man. … In the rights of the States are to be found the only effectual means of checking the overaction of this Government; to resist its tendency to concentrate all power here, and to prevent a departure from the constitution; or, in case of one, to restore the Government to its original simplicity and purity. State interposition, or, to express it more fully, the right of a State to interpose her sovereign voice as one of the parties to our constitutional compact, against the encroachments of this Government, is the only means of sufficient potency to effect all this.”[i]

In Calhoun’s 1831 Fort Hill Address, he further clarifies: “The general Government emanated from the people of the several States, forming distinct political communities, and acting in their separate and sovereign capacity, and not from all of the people forming one aggregate political community. … The Constitution of the United States is in fact a compact, to which each State is a party. … The several States or parties have a right to judge of its infractions … . This right of interposition…be it called what it may, State right, veto, nullification, or by any other name, I conceive to be the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts historically as certain, as our Revolution itself. … Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or a consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting ultimately on the solid basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, and violence, and force must finally prevail. Let it never be forgotten that where the majority rules the minority is the subject; and that if we should absurdly attribute to the former, the exclusive right of construing the Constitution, there would be in fact between the sovereign and subject, under such a government, no Constitution.”[ii]

The foundations of our kritarchy were laid in the early days of the Republic. Chief Justice John Marshall established the doctrine of judicial review in his 1803 Marbury v. Madison opinion, declaring that it is for the judiciary “to say what the law is.” Sixteen years later, the Marshall Court abrogated the Tenth Amendment entirely, thereby vitiating state sovereignty, in McCulloch v. Maryland by the oxymoronic creation of “implied enumeration” out of whole cloth. The “Necessary and Proper” Clause of Article I, Section VIII, was interpreted so as to loosely construe the word “necessary” to be expansive, rather than restrictive. The Court took it upon itself to determine what could be treated as the “necessary” means of constitutional execution, ruling that the Constitution was simply an adaptable “framework.”

President Andrew Jackson famously resisted judicial usurpation; in the aftermath of Worcester v. Georgia (wherein Chief Justice Marshall laid the nonsensical foundation of the doctrine of tribal sovereignty, describing Indian tribes as sovereign “nations” free from state criminal jurisdiction), Jackson remarked, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Perhaps remembering Alexander Hamilton’s assurance in Federalist 78 that the judiciary was to be the “least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution,” Jackson further utilized the constitutional fact of state sovereignty and rebutted Marshall’s bastardization of the “Necessary and Proper” Clause in his 1832 veto message, blocking the re-chartering of the second Bank of the United States: “Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered well settled. … The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. … Thus may our own powers and the rights of the States, which we cannot directly curtail or invade, be frittered away and extinguished in the use of means employed by us to execute other powers. … There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils only exist in its abuses. … Nor is our Government to be maintained or our Union preserved by invasions of the rights and powers of the several States. In thus attempting to make our General Government strong we make it weak. Its true strength consists in leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves—in making itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence; not in its control, but in its protection; not in binding the States more closely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed in its proper orbit.”

White Activism Short of Secession

In this vein, we can begin to formulate local and state resistance that is short of secession. In a piece in, of all outlets, The Federalist, ‘Bill Kilgore’ proposes exactly that for pro-life resistance to the infanticide that Roe v. Wade unconstitutionally enshrined. In summary, we can simply refuse to obey the capricious dictates of unelected bureaucrats and kritarchs. All that we need to do, provided that we have a unified governor and state legislature, is stop listening to them. They have no enforcement power whatsoever; Leftist-controlled jurisdictions regularly nullify federal law, with drug legalization, immigration, and infringements on the Second Amendment only the most recent examples. It is only when men of the Right pass laws unsatisfactory to the ruling class that the judiciary intervenes. Judicial review is not judicial supremacy; courts may say whatever they wish to, but they cannot act.

By forcing a constitutional crisis on any issue of White identity, we win; either the federal government will stand down or drop the mask to send in troops a la Eisenhower in Little Rock, provoking whatever resistance there would ever be. Moreover, the judiciary has no jurisdiction over political questions. To enshrine this principle further, Congress can strip federal jurisdiction over any category of cases it pleases, leaving them to state courts. The life tenure of judges may also be assailed, as their reign of terror and contravention of the will of the people are certainly not “good behavior.” If we can elect leaders with the requisite will, we can accomplish much; enforcing universal E-Verify, stringent voter identification requirements, taxing remittances, ending public services for illegal aliens, mass deportation, the declaration of English as our official language, prosecuting Leftist “charities” violating our laws, ending affirmative action and diversity quotas, eliminating hate crimes, exercising state legislative control over public school and university curriculums, validating the right of free association, and ending anarcho-tyrannical policies favoring criminals are but a smattering of the possibilities.

Of course, all this is much easier said than done. In Part 2 I discuss some of the obstacles.

Go to Part 2.

1 Wilson, Clyde N. (Ed.). The Essential Calhoun (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2012).

2 Wilson, Clyde N. (Ed.). The Essential Calhoun (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2012).